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Poetry Quotes

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Poetry Quotes

“Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.”

World Trying Important Ideas Feelings Poetry Literature Serious Poetry Is Serious Business

Book:A Poetry Handbook

Source: A Poetry Handbook

“What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.”

Mean Important Poetry Powerful Connections Poetry Is Aspire What's Important Dominance

Author:June Jordan

“Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.”

Thinking Important Poetry Dumb Poetry Is Diamond Donkey

Book:Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

Source: Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

“But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.”

Important Self Poetry Poetry Is Preservation Self Preservation

Book:The ballad and the source

Source: The ballad and the source

“At the outset, it is only liking, not understanding, that matters. Gaps in understanding ... are not only important, they are perhaps even welcome, like clearings in the woods, the better to allow the heart's rays to stream out without obstacle. The unlit shadows should remain obscure, which is the very condition of enchantment.”

Should Heart Important Matter Poetry Literature Understanding Conditions Shadow Obstacles Woods Welcome Streams Gaps Rays Obscure Enchantment Clearing

Author:Andre Breton

“A statue of Apollo in a museum does not seem naked, but attach a tie to its neck and it will strike us as indecent ... The text is one of the components of an artistic work, albeit an extremely important component ... But the artistic effect as a whole arises from comparisons of the text with a complex set of ontological and ideological esthetic ideas.”

Doe Important Ideas Whole Seems Poetry Literature Effects Complexes Strikes Arise Naked Artistic Ties Necks Comparison Museums Components Statues Apollo Ideological

Author:Yuri Lotman

“Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.”

Important Reality Poetry Approach Tests Poetry Is Closeness

Author:Babette Deutsch

“I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important.”

Ifs Want Firsts Important Faces Mother Poetry Father Stars Wonder Imagine Baby Moon Roots Distance Rounds Boxes Dumb Staring Pale Minerals Stripes

Author:Sylvia Plath

“He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.”

Source: Little Kingdoms

“Does God know the number of kisses before we fall in love? Yesterday, I was nobody and I believed myself important. Today, I feel my worth in you. You, with your emerald eyes and ebony hair, even your heartbeat is beautiful. You, who is my greatest joy, all other concerns vanish in your presence. You swallow time and consume space, inspiring all my passion with a single embrace. I love your existence.”