Quotes About Expression

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

Then others for breath of words respect, Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

I sang in my chains like the sea

When there's music in your soul, there's soul in your music.

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

Poems are difficult to silence.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.

Poetry makes nothing happen.

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job