Quotes About The Nature Of Poetry

#1. It is in the nature of poetry that it speaks to the heart as well as the head.

Malcolm Guite

#2. I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

A.R. Ammons

#3. Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Peter Davison

#4. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.

James Freeman Clarke

#5. The Net
I made you many and many a song,
Yet never one told all you are
It was as though a net of words
Were flung to catch a star;
It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea.

Sara Teasdale

#6. How light the raindrop's contents are;
how gently the world touches me.

From View With a Grain of Sand

Wislawa Szymborska

#7. Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.

Erasmus Darwin

#8. stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are.

AVA.

#9. Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,
Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:
The worth of all men by their end esteem,
And then praise, or due reproach them yield.

Edmund Spenser

#10. I find it incredibly amazing how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade. No cloud is ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece. A new wonder. A new memory.

Sanober Khan

#11. I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

Howard Nemerov

#12. The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Charles Darwin

#13. In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.

Madame De Stael

#14. Where there are many beauties in a poem I shall not cavil at a few faults proceeding either from negligence or from the imperfection of our nature.

Horace

#15. Sound is the one true vocabulary of nature

and not the peacock-palette painters swear
he uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes ["Sound," Poetry, September 2015].

Billy Ramsell

#16. holding
the evening
tremblingly close
to me

i weep
into
the sun

letting
the burden
of hope
lift off my chest

i realize

this is what
it means
to be free.

Sanober Khan

#17. Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject ... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.

Washington Allston

#18. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.

Paul Kingsnorth

#19. Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.

Hugh Miller

#20. Mother Earth, one of my absolute favorite places ... where the sounds, the energy, the beauty and the Life pounds into your every fiber of being, letting you Know that you are alive. I will always respect and honor this gift of creation that we call our home.

Peace Gypsy

#21. I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.

Paul Banks

#22. The River Swish

Deftly maneuvered through
the dark green abyss ~
The wooden raft seemed
in tune with this ~
Canorous rush of the
river swish....

Muse

#23. Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.

Octavio Paz

#24. One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

William Wordsworth

#25. True poetry, like the religious prompting itself, springs from the emotional side of a man's complex nature, and is ever in harmony with his highest intuitions and aspirations.

Epes Sargent

#26. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Harold Bloom

#27. And that is the nature of us poets and whores, to make things hard: dicks, choices... life.

Nicole Lyons

#28. Superstition is the poetry of life. It is inherent in man's nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it takes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once, as soon as it can do it with safety.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#29. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#30. Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants to become an object ofart.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#31. We live mindfully by harvesting evocative scenes to pay attention to including the mountains and oceans, flowers and trees, love and friendship, music and literature, art and poetry.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#32. I am just like you,
Destined to play my part.
And leave,
In the nature of my departure at least,
Some kind of sweet message behind
In the fathomless pattern I make.

Scott Hastie

#33. I asked of the limitless sunshine
How to shine with the dawn's glowing light;
No answer came back from the sunshine,
But my soul heard a whisper, "Burn bright!

K. Balmont

#34. A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space
a place not just set apart but reverberant
and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.

Michael Pollan

#35. to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature

William Wordsworth

#36. When
When it's over, it's over, and we don't know
any of us, what happens then.
So I try not to miss anything.
I think, in my whole life, I have never missed
The full moon
or the slipper of its coming back.
Or, a kiss.
Well, yes, especially a kiss.

Mary Oliver

#37. Dance,' they told me, and I stood still,
and while I stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced.
'Pray,' they said, and I laughed,
covering myself in the earth's brightnesses,
and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel,
and prayed like an orphan.

Wendell Berry

#38. Oh the beauty of nature!
Oh the magical heart touching flower.
My heart wants to bloom like you
with love, joy, and laughter.

Debasish Mridha

#39. It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.

Lewis Thomas

#40. Life without love is like a bird without feathers. Life without love is like a butterfly without wings it's the saddest of things.
"In this life I can live without many things love is not on that list

Charles W. Warner

#41. The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.

R.H. Blyth

#42. Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

Diane Ackerman

#43. there is something magical and addicting about going somewhere, being alone, and finding yourself in parts of the world you never knew existed, finding parts of yourself you never knew you would find.

AVA.

#44. Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

John Barton

#45. At dawn, the grains of sleep turn to floating black spots, then out of focus the world tilts, and the cat scratches at the door ...

John Geddes

#46. The poet's nature is all searching, creator and nourisher of desire; the poet is like the heart in a people's breast, a people without a poet is a mere heap of clay. If the purpose of poetry is the fashioning of men, poetry is likewise the heir of prophecy.

Muhammad Iqbal

#47. Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

David Hare

#48. And when I was born, I drew in common air, and fell upon the earth, which is of like nature; and the first voice which I uttered was crying, as all others do."

by Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Steven J. Jacobson

#49. Laying out grounds ... may be considered as a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting ... it is to assist Nature in moving the affections ... the affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauty of Nature ...

William Wordsworth

#50. I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.

Andrew Motion

#51. Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature.

John Dryden

#52. The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, - the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#53. That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

#54. let me tell you i'm in love with you. let me tell you that the first thing i do when i wake is think of you. let me be completely honest about this-- about what you mean to me.
let me take it there without ruining everything.

AVA.

#55. I'm Noah, and you are the ship coasting along the banks and as long as you are my valentine I will sail between your eyes..

Adel Abouhana

#56. Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation
Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;
Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses

Sylvia Plath

#57. The ocean-blue bowl won't
refuse to bruise, won't hold it back
from the gaping earth-wounds.
There will still come
water, chill wind and happy
goosebumps,
and in the utmost corners of oaks,
leaves laughing.

Bryana Johnson

#58. I am a baby, I am a child, I am the innocent wonder in my eyes

I am a glimpse, I am a sign, of someone I can be, someone I might

I am not one, I am not two, but I am a million things entwined

I am a piece, I am a slice, strung together by the yarns of time.

Sanober Khan

#59. In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.

Aberjhani

#60. Offerings gleam beneath consecrated trees,
boulders, and caves where Kami nature spirits
minister to congregations of saki cans, lotus root,
and the glow of tangerines; still-lives silent as prayer.

Jalina Mhyana

#61. Resolve, and thou art free. But breathe the air
Of mountains, and their unapproachable summits
Will lift thee to the level of themselves.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#62. For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud
and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule
that everything that exists in nature exists in art.

Victor Hugo

#63. Beauty
Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought
Is therapeutic.
If, after several
Applications, you do not find
Relief, consult your family physician

Robert Penn Warren

#64. For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

William Wordsworth

#65. We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.

Dejan Stojanovic

#66. Calligraphy of geese
against the sky-
the moon seals it.

Yosa Buson

#67. There can be no law of nature, no science,
No aberrant infliction of human will
That unchained the soul cannot conquer,
Simply sweep away, should it chose to.

Scott Hastie

#68. Heroic poetry has ever been esteemed the greatest work of human nature.

John Dryden

#69. I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal, and is known as the harmonic series.

Leonard Bernstein

#70. Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#71. you'd take one look at me and whole pieces of the earth would break off and fall away finally leaving me alone with you.

AVA.

#72. The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

Jean Giraudoux

#73. And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth.

Walt Whitman

#74. Let the wet earth embrace you firmly, soundly.
She needs to be revived, she needs to beat like a heart
full of adrenaline inside a chest.

V.S. Atbay

#75. The stars are forth, the moon above the tops
Of the snow-shining mountains. - Beautiful!
I linger yet with Nature, for the night
Hath been to me a more familiar face
Than that of man; and in her starry shade
Of dim and solitary loveliness,
I learn'd the language of another world.

George Gordon Byron

#76. With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light.

Aberjhani

#77. Through its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks the melody of nature amid the noise of the dictionary, then, picking it out like picking out a tune, it gives itself up to improvisation on that theme.

Boris Pasternak

#78. Some of the best music was composed by Beethovan,but he was deaf,some of the best poetry of nature was written by Milton,but he was deaf.possible is always inside the impossible ...

Shibin Mohammed

#79. I am the eye that beholds ... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky ... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love.

Solange Nicole

#80. 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.

Margaret Atwood

#81. This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

Aberjhani

#82. The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

Mary Oliver

#83. The poetry is the Earth, charming; The river, flowing from lofty mountains; Nature, a young woman and a heavenly plant with blossoming flowers, slinking in the garden of the mind.

Manmohan Acharya

#84. Not knowing the name of the tree,
I stood in the flood
of its sweet scent.

Matsuo Basho

#85. Poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.

Vernon Lee

#86. With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#87. Across the snowy field the barn light gleams - it's the loneliness of November twilight ...

John Geddes

#88. By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,
From there the wind comes and blows over the world,
By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,
From there the clouds come and rain falls over the world.

Jane Bierhorst

#89. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

Virginia Woolf

#90. Nature, it seems, is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.

Piet Hein

#91. Dreaming is the poetry of Life, and we must be forgiven if we indulge in it a little.

John Galsworthy

#92. Whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry. Picture is the invention of heaven, the most ancient and most akin to nature. It is itself a silent work, and always one and the same habit.

Ben Jonson

#93. Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.

William Wordsworth

#94. The resurrection of the morning.
The mystery of the night.
The hummingbird's wings.
The excitement of thunder.
The rainbow in the waterfall.
Wild mustard, that rough blaze of the fields.

Mary Oliver

#95. Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

Adrienne Rich

#96. It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

John Ruskin

#97. There is an old Latin quotation in regard to the poet which says 'Poeta nascitur non fit' the translation of which is - the poet is born, not made.

Joseph Devlin

#98. Pine trees rise through cloud
soar up into the blue skies,
bush clover spangled with dewdrops
sways in the autumn breeze;
As I dip cold, pure water
at the edge of the stream,
a solitary white crane
comes lolloping my way.

Baisao

#99. There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.

Lenore Kandel

#100. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.

Kenneth Koch