Metaphor In Poems Quotes & Sayings

Wilfred Funk writes in Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories that originally all words were poems, since our language is based, like poems, in metaphor. — Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

I think poetry without metaphor is like husband and wife living in separate bedrooms. — Munia Khan

Between eigtheen and twenty, life is like an exchange where one buys stocks, not with money, but with actions. Most men buy nothing. — Andre Malraux

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it. — Nicole Krauss

Hera the cow queen, — Rick Riordan

Greed kills us all. — Kentetsu Takamori

We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change, and we need power. — Martin Luther King Jr.

[U]sing religion to treat depression often makes the problem worse. It's like treating the disease with more of the disease. It is effective in getting people to give time and money to the church, but it does not help the victim. — Darrel Ray

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook. — Stephen Dobyns

I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques. — David Lehman

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. — Donald Hall

Woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium ... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art. — Cynthia Ozick

As I read my poems aloud, I paid still more attention to sound in my writing. One morning as I revised, I set down a word that I knew was not right, and I heard myself think: But I can say it so that it's right. Immediately, I knew that I had understood one of the hazards of reading aloud. Performance can paper over bad writing, or substitute for the best language. Performance is a problem, and most performance poets or slammers are actors or standup comedians and not poets; we never hear a line break and seldom a new metaphor. There are other problems with the popularity of the poetry reading, but largely the reading has been good for poetry because poets watch their own poems come back to them on the faces of listeners. One addresses not only the Muse but actual people. — Donald Hall

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author's life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut. — Jane Yolen

Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost. — Jamie Wyeth

Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt, exhausted, and stayed. — Emily Fridlund

Whenever I realized that a guard was mean I pretended that I understood no English. I remember one cowboy coming to me with an ugly frown on his face: "You speak English?" he asked. "No English," I replied. "We don't like you to speak English. We want you to die slowly," he said. "No English," I kept replying. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction that his message arrived. People with hatred always have something to get off their chests, but I wasn't ready to be that drain. — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Dante Walker, you're about as gangster as Will Smith. — Victoria Scott

With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This is a very, very important achievement. — Kwame Dawes