The world needs poetry now more than ever. It's the only thing that can keep music from copying itself and sounding the same.
I think that the habit of gloomy poetry is very funny. It’s like a special competition in losing.
Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.
What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.
Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
Music is my thing. It's my thing; it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me; it's Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
