Best poetry & ifs Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.”

Ifs Poetry Poor Rich Poet Sorry Dull Spares Commonplace

Author:William Bolitho

“That I make poetry and give pleasure - if I give pleasure - are because of you.”

Ifs Giving Poetry Pleasure Because Of You

Author:Horace

“What matters Death, if Freedom be not dead? No flags are fair, if Freedom's flag be furled. Who fights for Freedom, goes with joyful tread To meet the fires of Hell against him hurled.”

Ifs Matter Poetry Fighting Hell Fire Fairs Flags Joyful What Matters Fighting For Freedom

Book:Joyce Kilmer: Memoir and poems

Source: Joyce Kilmer: Memoir and poems

“If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.”

Ifs Mean Body Poetry Reading Books

Author:M. H. Abrams

“A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.”

Ifs Poetry Ignorance Poet Walking Dignity Destroying Threatening Trance Precipice

Author:Margaret Atwood

“These days, if you happen to be a poet you have to sing your words to get your ideas out.”

Ifs Ideas Happens Poetry Poet These Days

Author:Sara Genn

“If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.”

“I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.”

People Ifs Want Mean Persons I Can Use Poetry Mines Good Life Interpreting

Author:Maya Angelou

“You panic button collector. You clock of beautiful ticks. You run out the door if you need to. You flock to the front row of your own class. You feather everything until you know you can always, always shake like a leaf on my family tree and know you belong here. You belong here and everything you feel is okay. Everything you feel is okay.”

Ifs Knows Inspirational Needs Feels Running Beautiful Poetry Class Doors Tree Fronts My Family Okay Clock Shakes Panic Buttons Leafs Feathers Flocks Collectors Tick

Author:Andrea Gibson

“In your arms I forget what the yarn knows of sweaters. I forget how to hold myself together. So if I unfold now like a love letter tell me you'll write back soon. Tell me you'll still come untethered.”

Ifs Knows Inspirational Writing Stills Together Poetry Forget Arms Letters Sweaters Love Letter Yarn

Author:Andrea Gibson

“So guess what, if I ever have my own team I am picking everyone first even the worst kid and the kid with the stutter like a skipping record 'cause I know all of us are scratched, even if you can't hear it when we speak.”

Ifs Knows Inspirational Firsts Kids Poetry Speak Causes My Own Records Team Worst What If

Author:Andrea Gibson

“If certain critics and poetasters had their way, 'Ordinary Piety' and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.”

Ifs Way Children Would Be Poetry Certain Masters Ordinary Critics Piety Dullness

Author:Edith Sitwell

“I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.”

People Ifs Mean Long Book Whole Feelings Poetry Community Effort Written Products Whole Life

Author:Anne Sexton

“What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?”

Ifs Mind Children Poetry Function Petty Cautious

Book:The Middleman and Other Stories

Source: The Middleman and Other Stories

“If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.”

Ifs Poetry Voice Taken Essentials Empty Bravery Surprise Willingness

Author:Jorie Graham

“If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.”

Ifs Poetry Turns Answers Sadness Talent Noise Abandoned Drag Immense Gifted Turn-on Urgency Aptitude Sense Of Urgency Giftedness

Author:Joy Harjo

“If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.”

Ifs Persons Art Poetry Happened Effects Disappear Collapse

Author:Paul Valery

“The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.”

Ifs Thinking Knows World Humans Art Poetry Certain Difficult Moral Awareness Art Is Function Primaries Efficient Deceiving

Author:W. H. Auden

“Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.”

Ifs Way May Littles Art Matter Poetry Style Poet Concerned

Book:Collected Poetry and Prose

Source: Collected Poetry and Prose

“When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filiament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.”

Ifs Mind Art Form Poetry Poet Combination Nevertheless Oxygen Acid Platinum

Book:Selected essays

Source: Selected essays

“A work of (whatever) art can be either 'received' or 'used'. ...'Using' is inferior to 'reception' because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it ... When the art in question is literature a complication arises, for to 'receive' significant words is always, in one sense, to 'use' them, to go through and beyond them to an imagined something which is not itself verbal.”

Ifs Doe Art Use Used Poetry Literature Our Lives Add Significant Arise Inferiors Complication Facilitate Reception

Author:C. S. Lewis

“When a philosopher, scientist, or psychologist discusses the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal, he or she attempts to convince us with the tools of discursive thought ... An artist does it differently ... their primary approach is different, even though both groups, if you will, are investigating the actual, the ideal, and the discrepancy in between.”

“Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.”

Ifs Whole Form Poetry Literature Accepting Economy Position Speed Outcomes Internals Interpretation Crucial Passages Subordinates Banality

Author:Umberto Eco

“If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.”

Ifs Poetry Literature Voice Records Survivor Shelter

Book:The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History

Source: The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History

“Don't feel guilty if you don't immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyoneneeds time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an "instant parent." Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.”

“If you want to understand poetry, You have to go to its origin, If you want to understand the poet, You have to go to the Poet's home.”

Ifs Want Home Poetry Poet Interpretation

Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.”

“Charity, like poetry, should be cultivated, if only for its being graceful.”

Ifs Should Poetry Grace Poet Charity

Book:The Confidence-Man

Source: The Confidence-Man

“A tattered copy of Johnson's large Dictionary was a great delight to me, on account of the specimens of English versifications which I found in the Introduction. I learned them as if they were so many poems. I used to keep this old volume close to my pillow; and I amused myself when I awoke in the morning by reciting its jingling contrasts of iambic and trochaic and dactylic metre, and thinking what a charming occupation it must be to "make up" verses.”

Ifs Thinking Used Poetry Found Morning Poet Accounts Delight Copies Occupation Contrast Verses Volume Charming Introduction Dictionary Johnson Pillow Amused Reciting

Book:A New England girlhood

Source: A New England girlhood

“The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.”

Ifs Poetry Attention Cases Poet Ought Faults Definitions Prose Relative Verses Propriety

Book:Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes

Source: Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge: In Two Volumes

“The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.”

Ifs Men Should Has Beens Poetry Reading Should Have Explanation One Man Should Have Been Worth Reading

Author:Archibald MacLeish

“The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.”

Ifs Art Play Poetry Understanding Imagination Serious Poet Speech Rhetoric Conducting Serious Business Free Play

Book:Kant's Critiques

Source: Kant's Critiques

“Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.”

“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”

Ifs World Said Might Poetry Moved Verses Inquisition

Book:Hardy: Selected Poems

Source: Hardy: Selected Poems

“And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.”

People Ifs May Littles Art Real Country Past Form Poetry Powerful Poet Indifference Columns Posters Peeling

Book:Selected poems

Source: Selected poems

“If one believes philosophers, then what we call religion is only a deliberately popularized or an instinctively artless philosophy. Poets seem to consider religion rather as a variation of poetry which by misjudging its proper beautiful game takes itself too seriously and one-sidedly. Philosophy, however, admits and recognizes that it can begin and complete itself only with religion. Poetry seeks only to strive for the infinite and despises worldly utility and culture, which are the true antitheses of religion. Eternal peace among artists is thus not far away.”

“I feel that the task of criticizing my poetry is best left to others (i.e. critics) and would much rather have it take place after I am dead. If at all.”

Ifs Feels Poetry Left Tasks Critics Poetry Is Criticize

Author:Margaret Atwood

“Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.”

Ifs Doe Together Poetry Groups Citizens Sitting Hunger Sitting Down Dismay

Book:John Mistletoe

Source: John Mistletoe

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.”

Ifs Love Inspirational Dream Life Is Poetry Dies Change Freedom Business Knowledge Positive Thinking Inspirational Life Broken Bird Wings Educational African American Novelists Your Dreams Broken Heart Dreamer American Dream Fulfilling Follow Your Dreams Black History Chase Your Dreams Dreams Do Come True Hopes And Dreams I Had A Dream Dreams And Reality Essayists Just A Dream Dreams You Have Hold Fast Columnists Black History Month Dare To Dream Small Dreams Dreams And Goals Broken Dreams Following Dreams Achieving Dreams Black History Month Inspirational Life Dream Dream Reality Following My Dreams African American History Achieving Your Dreams Inspirational Dream Life Is A Dream Dreams And Aspirations Hopes Dreams Black History Inspirational Life And Dreams Harlem Renaissance Fulfilling Dreams African American Inspirational Dreaming About You Never Stop Dreaming Broken Wings Bird Flying Cute Dream Dreams And Passion Hopes In Life Dream Chasing Fulfilling Your Dreams

Author:Langston Hughes

“We're talking about an extremely prolific poet and songwriter and lyricist. That stuff comes off the top of her head. She [Joni Mitchell] will write exactly what she lives. If she puts some money in the soda machine, she'll write about putting money in the soda machine. "Dry Cleaner from Des Moines," on the Shadows & Light album, was about sitting next to a dry cleaner from Des Moines, playing a slot machine.”

Ifs Writing Light Poetry Next Stuff Talking Poet Sitting Shadow Machines Albums Dry Songwriters Cleaners Soda Slot Machines Lyricists Des Moines Dry Cleaners

Author:Don Alias

“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.”

Ifs Ends Whole Poetry Lost Jokes Poetry Is One Word

Author:W. S. Merwin

“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”

Ifs World Would Be Poetry Hunger

Author:Muriel Rukeyser

“The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say”

Ifs Way I Can Poetry Gone Path Doors Feet Rings Geek Fellowship Down The Road Errands Fellowship Of The Ring Books And Movies Lord Of The Ring Many Paths

Author:J. R. R. Tolkien

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

Ifs Knows Way Feels Book Whole Body Poetry Taken Fire Cold Warm

Author:Emily Dickinson

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.”

Ifs Thinking Knows World Ends Enough Desire Poetry Hate Fire Destruction Favors Ice Great Poetry Fire And Ice Greatest Poetry

Author:Robert Frost

“Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterward remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.”

Ifs Should Hands Remember Poetry Turns Forget Half Darkness Gone Land Praying Late Silent Corruption Grieving Our Future Far Away Remember Me Hold Me Forget Me Gone Away Grieving Poems

Author:Christina Rossetti

“If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.”

Ifs Want Poetry Poet Annoying Nerdiness

Book:Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile

Source: Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”

“Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.”

Ifs Mind Firsts Has Beens Poetry Sound Written Poet Eternal First Time Invisible Tablets Good Poetry

Book:The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source: The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.”

Ifs Writing Trying Poetry Certain Cat Fishes Poetry Is Stale

Author:Osbert Sitwell

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