Quotes About Lyric Poetry

#1. Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do.

Stephen Sondheim

#2. The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.

Kevin Hart

#3. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity.

C.M. Kornbluth

#4. This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Eugenio Montale

#5. A beautiful woman combining the prospect of happiness and nakedness in the same spoken sentence could achieve the power of the greatest lyric poetry.

Nick Hornby

#6. We have certain rules for traditional lyric poetry in Korea. I twist my body, confused by what to say and how to act, facing these rules. Confronting traditional lyricism, I speak with a bare body without the tattoos of culture on it.

Kim Hyesoon

#7. Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group.

George Orwell

#8. Most songs have bridges in them, to distract listeners from the main verses of a song so they don't get bored. My songs don't have a lot of bridges because lyric poetry never had them.

Bob Dylan

#9. I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon. For me, the moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry.

Mary Ruefle

#10. It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Boris Pasternak

#11. Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn't tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur over this, that, and the other.

Michael Dirda

#12. There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#13. I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.

Edward Hirsch

#14. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Seamus Heaney

#15. Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!

Frank Iero

#16. Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#17. It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.

John Fuller

#18. Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

Seamus Heaney

#19. Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,
epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#20. The length and shape of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection and commentary.

Susan Stewart

#21. Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not "Devil's wine," but God's wine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#22. The ethos and critique are of poetry, which becomes a rich dark with a phosphorescence of lyric as witness.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

#23. He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#24. Although I was able to study music with teachers, I never studied lyric writing. I read poetry, and I read other lyricists. But they were never writing in the style or the form that I was interested in.

Paul Simon

#25. There ain't no money in poetry, that's what keeps the poet free. I've had all the freedom I can stand.

Guy Clark

#26. I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea.

Charlotte Eriksson

#27. My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.

Ernesto Cardenal

#28. But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

Evelyn Waugh

#29. I tend to write poetry that is rich in data of various sorts. The lyric poem isn't perfectly suited to accommodating such data, so I've had to find new ways to say everything that I want to say.

Campbell McGrath

#30. A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

John Drinkwater

#31. A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

Claudia Rankine

#32. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.

Forrest Gander

#33. Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.

Vijay Seshadri

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

Seamus Heaney