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Poetry Quotes

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Poetry Quotes

“Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person.”

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Author:Jack Spicer
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“One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.”

IfsFeelsWritingYearsWellsMayStillsCharacterFactsUseDesirePoetryReligiousRoomsStudyPsychologyAliveEventsOne DayDecidedPreparedVariousInsightMoodImpulseSubstanceShelterSpeculationLiquidNourishmentOccultAiryYeatsAmoeba
Author:Robert Bly
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“I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.”

I CanPoetryHavensGood ManThrough The Looking GlassHumpty Dumpty
Book:The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll With All the Original Illustrations + The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll: All the Novels, Stories and Poems: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland + Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There + Sylvie and Bruno + A Tangled Tale + What the Tortoise Said to Achilles + Puzzles from Wonderland + The Hunting of the Snark and much more
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“'Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?' 'I read it in a book,' said Alice. 'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much easier than that, by - Tweedledee, I think it was.' 'As to poetry, you know,' said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, 'I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that - ' 'Oh, it needn't come to that!' Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning.”

IfsThinkingKnowsWellsSaidI CanBookHardHandsPoetryStuffEasierFolksRepeatsStretchingHumpty Dumpty
Author:Lewis Carroll
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“If not then you must be trying to hear us and in such cases we cannot be heard. We remain in the darkness, unseen. In the center of unpeeled bananas, we exist. Uncolored by perception. Clothed to the naked eye. Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence. And that's the only fact. In fact, there are no facts.”

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Book:The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop
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“Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.”

ReasonPoetryCausesDifficultPositionPoetLogicComplexesDependentSubtleSevereGreat PoetFugitiveOdes
Book:Biographia Literaria, Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions
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“Peitaho Heavy rains fall on Yuyen, the northland kingdom of swallows. White pages of rain envelop the sky, and fishing boats off the Island of the Emperor Chin disappear on the ocean. Which way have they gone? More than a thousand years ago the mighty emperor Tsao Tsao cracked his whip and drove his army against the Tartars. He left us a poem: "Let us move east to the Stone Mountains." Today we still shiver in the autumn gale, in desolate winds, yet another man is in the world.”

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Author:Mao Zedong
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“Poem for Liu Ya-tzu I cannot forget how in Canton we drank tea and in Chungking went over our poems when leaves were yellowing. Thirty-one years ago and now we come back at last to the ancient capital Peking. In this season of falling flowers I read your beautiful poems. Be careful not to be torn inside. Open your vision to the world. Don't say that waters of Kumming Lake are too shallow. We can watch fish better here than in the Fuchun River in the south.”

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Author:Mao Zedong
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“I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie.”

PoetryTurnsTreeCryEdgesTeethDryKittenBalladsBrazenGrate
Book:Renaissance Acting Editions: The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of HENRY Sirnamed HOT-SPURRE [King Henry IV, Part 1]
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“The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.”

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Book:The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
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