Emotion And Poetry Quotes & Sayings

The poems which touched her heart most, suffusing her with exalted emotion, so that she felt she could gather everything to her, were those which tell of the sorrow that wakes in the heart whose dreams have not been fulfilled, and of the beauty of that sorrow. The ship which in Autumn lies deserted on the shore, rudderless, mastless, used no more; the bird that cowers low in shelter, likewise in the Autumn, featherless and forlorn, driven before the storm;the harp that hangs trembling on the wall, silently mourning its owner's fall-all this was her poetry. — Halldor Laxness

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril — Andrew Motion

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. — Gaston Bachelard

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. — E. M. Forster

A poet is an unpaid laborer of a mine where he digs into the mountain to find rough diamonds. He then polishes them with his imagination and emotion to share with everyone. — Debasish Mridha

What you call poetry and passion are nothing but lies - with beautiful facades. Out of your hundred poets, ninety-nine are not really poets but only people in a state of turmoil, emotion, passion, heat, lust, sexuality, sensuality. Only one out of your hundred poets is a real poet. And the real poet may never compose any poetry, because his whole being is poetry. The way he walks, the way he sits, the way he eats, the way he sleeps - it is all poetry. He exists as poetry. He may create poetry, he may not create poetry, that is irrelevant. But what you call poetry is nothing but the expression of your fever, of your heated state of consciousness. It is a state of insanity. Passion is insane, blind, unconscious - because it gives you the feeling as if it is love. Love — Osho

The poet should even act his story with the very gestures of his personages. Given the same natural qualifications, he who feels the emotions to be described will be the most convincing; distress and anger, for instance, are portrayed most truthfully by one who is feeling them at the moment. Hence it is that poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him; the former can easily assume the required mood, and the latter may be actually beside himself with emotion. — Aristotle.

For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as "abstract" when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Renaissance Humanism, which under Petrarch's formation and tutelage vindicated the importance of poetry and rhetoric as effectors of an intimate bond between reason and emotion, thought and action, intellect and will. Petrarchan Humanism became the historical force mobilizing thought and letters against the blind impulsiveness of an illusory popular culture and the elitism of the philosophical schools" (Trinkaus, 135). — Charles Edward Trinkaus

What else is a poem about?
The rhythm and the images buried in the language. All the ways you can build an emotion with words, but you can't just write 'I feel sad.' I mean, you can, but it's not poetry ... I think it has to be experienced instead of studied. You step into it. — Garret Freymann-Weyr

I never heard sound and thrill of my painful heart until that very day she touched it. — Santosh Kalwar

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language. — Donald Hall

While ritual, emotion and reasoning are all significant aspects of human nature, the most nearly unique human characteristic is the ability to associate abstractly and to reason. Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species; and the most characteristically human activities are mathematics, science, technology, music and the arts
a somewhat broader range of subjects than is usually included under the "humanities." Indeed, in its common usage this very word seems to reflect a peculiar narrowness of vision about what is human. Mathematics is as much a "humanity" as poetry. — Carl Sagan

A poem begins as an inner tune in the heart that beats with emotions and words waiting to be played with love. — Debasish Mridha

I do not mean merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the characteristics of the real artist. — Oscar Wilde

But what slayed Robert was that for all these years, all his adult life, he'd never believed in relationships and commitment. They were highly overrated as far as he was concerned. Some people's entire lives revolved around love ... finding it, keeping it. People had written poetry about it, had sacrificed for it, had even died for it. And he'd never been able to understand why. Why would anyone want to invest themselves in such a fickle emotion that sounded too good to be true because it was too good to be true. When the going got tough, even when someone claimed to love and be committed to the people in their lives, they really only honored that commitment when things were good. — M.L. Rhodes

A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry. — Edward Hirsch

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

There are times ... when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.
... When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. — Mary Doria Russell

If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.' — Taylor Mali

What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it. Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don't even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don't want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I'll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it. — Tarryn Fisher

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions. — Pattiann Rogers

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. — Robert Frost

By eloquence I understand those appeals to our moral perceptions that produce emotion as soon as they are uttered. This is the very enthusiasm that is the parent of poetry. Let the same man go to his closet and clothe in numbers conceptions full of the same fire and spirit, and they will be poetry. — Kobe Bryant

Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance — Philip Larkin

I knew that I wanted to be a singer/songwriter when I was much younger and, um, I've been able to, you know, to realize that dream and I'm very pleased with that ... I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry ... Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing emotion-very powerful emotions. — Annie Lennox

The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness. — John Stuart Mill

But Wordsworth stuck with me when he said, "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." This book is a spontaneous overflow in the middle of chaos, not tranquillity. So it's not a poem to you. It's a half poem. It's a "po." It's a Poehler po. Wordsworth also said that the best part of a person's life is "his little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love." I look forward to reading a book one day in which someone lists mine. I feel like I may have failed to do so. Either way, it's obvious I am currently on a Wordsworth kick and this should give you literary confidence as you read Yes Please. The — Amy Poehler

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry. — Gregory Orr

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion
a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. — George Eliot

Fishing books , lit by emotion recollected in tranquility, are like poetry.. We do not think of them as books but as men. They are our companions and not only riverside. Summer and winter they are with us and what a pleasant company they are. — Arthur Ransome

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely. — Louise Bogan

Ive realized that even more that what is beautiful about the accordion is to play with a single finger sometimes, with a very pure, very pointed sound that gives a lot of poetry and emotion. — Richard Galliano

Caeiro's work is truly a manifestation of a pagan mind. The order and discipline of paganism which Christianity caused us to lose, the reasoned intelligence of things, which was paganism's most obvious attribute and no longer ours - permeate his work. Because it speaks here its form, we see the essence, not the exterior shape, of paganism. In other words, I do not see Caeiro reconstructing the exterior form of paganism. Paganism's very substance has in fact been summoned up from Avernus, as Orpheus summoned Eurydice, by the harmelodic magic of Caeiro's emotion. — Ricardo Reis

The taste of the apple ... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way ... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading. — Jorge Luis Borges

A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion. — Debasish Mridha

Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses. — Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

Although I've written a few (a very few) poems over the years, I am not a natural poet ... and I remain in awe of people who are. The ability to evoke deep emotion, reveal a new facet of the world, or condense an entire story into the limited space and form of a poem (or likewise, of a good song lyric, or the text for a children's picture book) seems like pure magic to me. — Terri Windling

A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words. — Debasish Mridha

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these. — T. S. Eliot

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art. — Fernando Pessoa

There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time like the heartbeat. There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it. That process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn and if we do not somehow learn it, then our minds lie in us like the fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish. — Ted Hughes

To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge. — Archibald MacLeish

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it - in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry. — Robert Pinsky

Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints. — John Dryden

It is natural to speak of hymns as "poems," indiscriminately, for they have the same structure. But a hymn is not necessarily a poem, while a poem that can be sung as a hymn is something more than a poem. Imagination makes poems; devotion makes hymns. There can be poetry without emotion, but a hymn never. A poem may argue; a hymn must not. In short to be a hymn, what is written must express spiritual feelings and desires. The music of faith, hope and charity will be somewhere in its strain. — Hezekiah Butterworth

In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.' ~ Randy Morgenson — Eric Blehm

Always write exactly what you're feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work ... make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing joyful things, feel lovey if it calls for it ... just put your heart and soul into all that you do ... then you will be a good writer when you can make whoever reads your work, feel. -Nina Jean Slack — Nina Jean Slack

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. — William Wordsworth

They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things or people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, fucking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possessions. — Thomas Cahill

The poems in Katherine Soniat's new collection, The Swing Girl, weave emotion's 'spray going farther than thought' with the 'bedrock things' of the trod-upon world. These poems eddy and pool in unpredictable and often surprising ways, much as the mind moves in its twilight state between waking and sleep. The fluidity of their cadence and the luminosity of their imagery carry the reader to the wellspring of poetry itself, that deep delight of which Robert Penn Warren spoke, whose source is, in Soniat's words, 'beauty on its way to being mystery.' — Kathryn Stripling Byer

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

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

Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition
not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop. — Stephen Dobyns

The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living. — T. S. Eliot

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours. — Zaeema J. Hussain

Before the Dawn
In the darkest night the sun may seem like an extinguished match or an ember drowned by rain.
A light forever lost.
The cold world grows steadily colder and shrinks like the abused, closing in on all sides. Laughter, smiles, the glimmer of dancing eyes, and all else indicative of human brightness is gone. Colors leeched from everything leave shadows and emotion dull-gray in their absence.
Time is a void. A moment feels eternal.
Hope does not blossom in the darkness but withers fast, starving for what only the sun can offer. As its petals turn to dust, fear blows in and sweeps the remnants away. The soul succumbs by degrees to nightmares emboldened by the dead of night.
All is lost! All is lost!
The wretched sun, repulsed by our nothingness,
has abandoned the lives in its care!
And then the eyes open wide,
seeing mountains take shape on the horizon. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery.
Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream. — Anais Nin

Is it a comb, a fan, a torn dress, a curtain, a bed, an empty rice-bin? It hardly seems to matter. The Chinese poet makes a heart-breaking poetry out of these quite as naturally as Keats did out of the song of a nightingale heard in a spring garden. It is rarely dithyrambic, rarely high-pitched: part of its charm is its tranquility, its self-control. And the humblest reads it with as much emotion as the most learned. — Conrad Aiken

But now he understood why someone would write things like 'she walked in beauty like the night' and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time. — Julie Anne Long

Rouge of my heart, intertwined with double-hued destiny,
Thread of my thoughts, constant and rubicund legacy,
Filament of my future, endeared unto my expectation,
Cord of my emotion, seared with eternal elation. — Jasper Fforde

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative. — Matthew Arnold

I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable. — Marge Simon