Top 50 Quotes About Understanding Poetry
#1. To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.
George Gissing
#2. I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.
Philippe Petit
#3. No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe.
Jocelyn Gibb
#4. Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot's poetry or Kant's logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently.
D.J. Taylor
#5. The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.
Nicholas Royle
#6. Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it's not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves.
Rachel Zucker
#7. Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.
John Constable
#8. The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#11. One day, when tenderness has become the single rule of the morning,/ I will wake in your arms. perhaps your skin will be overly gorgeous./ and the light will include the impossible understanding of love.
Jose Luis Peixoto
#12. Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
Peter Davison
#13. Dining at the rare reason
To get between the circumstance
And start milking the Caesars
For what enters the ears
And is for their eyes to air and advise.
Initially NO
#14. Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry ...
Primo Levi
#15. ..i spill into
the kind of silence
only Khalil Gibran would understand.
Sanober Khan
#16. Women invented misery,
but we don't understand it.
Rita Dove
#18. I am five, I will never understand
why we are stranded in our selves
but in this moment I know
my own story
is understanding our singleness
that I am destined to move my body and time
into the body-time
the story
of Others.
Sharon Doubiago
#19. Yes, I wrote that for you, who can't sort out lie from lay no matter how often I explain it - crayons and perfume - you still don't get it ...
John Geddes
#20. Senses empower limitations, senses expand vision within borders, senses promote understanding through pleasure.
Dejan Stojanovic
#21. Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.
Nicholas Sparks
#22. He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.
Dejan Stojanovic
#23. There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.
George MacDonald
#24. [About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Niels Bohr
#25. Old words are reborn with new faces.
Criss Jami
#26. Oh that's right
Keep away from me Please give me a push
Don't let me understand you Don't realise me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific Nirvana
Me you --- you --- me
Mina Loy
#27. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#28. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#29. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.
Dana Gioia
#31. Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.
Ben Fountain
#32. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things.
J.D. Salinger
#33. These hands are unlike any other
strong
but gentle
caring
loving
and understanding
April Nichole
#34. Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall.
Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen
#35. Thus it is, we sow motions of hatred out of our own impoverished understanding of love. Yet we do so in the name of love. The perplexing precipice of the illusory infirmity.
Steven Storm
#36. And they were deeply moved not so much by the poetry as by their sensitivity to poetry; not so much by the genius of the poem as by their wisdom in understanding the poem; not in knowing the poem but in knowing the poem demonstrated the higher side of themselves and of the Japanese spirit -
Richard Flanagan
#37. I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.
Jane Hirshfield
#38. 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.
Immanuel Kant
#39. Poems can get
sleepless too
and become
the loneliest thing
in the universe.
Sanober Khan
#40. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#42. A child playing with dolls may shed heartfelt tears when his bundle of rags and scraps becomes deathly ill and dies ... So we may come to an understanding of language as playing with dolls: in language, scraps of sound are used to make dolls and replace all the things in the world.
Velimir Khlebnikov
#43. Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?
Kathleen Raine
#44. Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
Peter Davison
#45. Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.
Fred D'Aguiar
#46. There's a universal
understanding between
men of the silent sorrow
a man endures when
he loses a woman he
loves
Phil Volatile
#47. From heart to heart
a heartbeat staggers, looking for a haven.
Bereft. It is easier to enter heaven
than to pass through each others' eyes
Bill Knott
#48. What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
Matsuo Basho
#49. I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.
Seamus Heaney
#50. Come lie beside me again and understand - the others can show by actions, but I alone will immortalize you in words ...
John Geddes
