Quotes & Sayings About Imagery In Poetry

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world. — Naomi Shihab Nye

]sing to us
the one with violets in her lap
]mostly
]goes astray — Sappho

Matt smirked. Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry? — Jessica Park

Poetry is fact given over to imagery. — Rod McKuen

Traditionally poetry is written in lines. But the prose poem is the kind of poem that isn't written in lines. It is lyrical prose that uses the tricks of poetry, such as dense imagery. This is a big topic of debate in poetry land. There's no perfect definition. — Campbell McGrath

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything. — Maya Angelou

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery. — Anne Sexton

[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

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go. — Anne Carson

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me. — Pablo Neruda

Why should it be any surprise that people find solace in the most intimate literary genre? Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortably into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Watch, how the sun
slowly rises
from behind my ear

new lines, new countries
spring up in my palms

my rough hair
become swaying silk

and all the leaves
in my body
become lusher than fruits. — Sanober Khan

Advertising is profoundly manipulative at its core. Its imagery strives to deprive us of realistic ideas about love, sex, beauty, health, money, work, and life itself, in an attempt to convince us that only products can bring us true joy. Its practitioners are trained in psychology, sociology, argumentation, poetry, and design. These are powerful tools in the art of persuasion, more so when deployed by a multibillion-dollar industry. — Jennifer L. Pozner

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships. — Antonin Artaud

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

]Sardis
often turning her thoughts here
]
you like a goddess
and in your song most of all she rejoiced.
But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women
as sometimes at sunset
the rosyfingered moon
surpasses all the stars. And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.
And the beautiful dew is poured out
and roses bloom and frail
chervil and flowering sweetclover.
But she goes back and forth remembering
gentle Atthis and in longing
she bites her tender mind — Sappho

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work. — Clifford Ross

Their heart grew cold
they let their wings down — Sappho

Among both the learned and the not so learned it is accepted that poetry can be the language of the emotions; what does not gain such ready acceptance is that poetry is a living language whose syllables fall naturally into verse. And yet both these effects may be illustrated simultaneously by the easy experiment of dropping a weight on your toe. Any really prolonged and heartfelt profanity may lack originality but its imagery is elaborately fantastic; and it invariably scans. — R.D. Fitzgerald

Poetry's magic lies in the imagery which satifies even without interpretation..it is accepted as easily as it was created. — Robert Bridges

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks. — William Carlos Williams

Jason Mashak's SALTY AS A LIP is grounded in a voice patiently bridging the "steeples and 'scrapers" of an inquisitive mind. The poems are at once syllogistic, hard-edged, satirical, reflective, and finally as playful as love notes. The true joy of this book is that we are deliciously engaged in a "pantomime of pleasure" which the language and imagery generously evoke. — James Ragan

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart. — Peggy Noonan

Sonnet: Political Greatness
Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,
Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,
Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;
Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,
History is but the shadow of their shame,
Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts
As to oblivion their blind millions fleet,
Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery
Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit
By force or custom? Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself; in it
Must be supreme, establishing his throne
On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy
Of hopes and fears, being himself alone. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves. — David Whyte