Metaphor In Poetry Quotes & Sayings

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

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor. — Siri Hustvedt

I hate seeing poetry in everything I touch. I hate that I can no longer love you without turning you into a metaphor - that it can never be simple as looking at you and saying yes, yes, yes. — Shinji Moon

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

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos. — Lyall Watson

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don't force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. — Ray Bradbury

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

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys. — Nikki Giovanni

While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.
Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. — Marcel Proust

It may also be that, quite apart from any specific references one food makes to another, it is the very allusiveness of cooked food that appeals to us, as indeed that same quality does in poetry or music or art. We gravitate towards complexity and metaphor, it seems, and putting fire to meat or fermenting fruit and grain, gives us both: more sheer sensory information and, specifically, sensory information that, like metaphor, points away from the here and now. This sensory metaphor - this stands for that - is one of the most important transformations of nature wrought by cooking. And so a piece of crisped pig skin becomes a densely allusive poem of flavors: coffee and chocolate, smoke and Scotch and overripe fruit and, too, the sweet-salty-woodsy taste of maple syrup on bacon I loved as a child. As with so many other things, we humans seem to like our food overdetermined. — Michael Pollan

Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

Literature destabilizes thought by breaking open language and smuggling in sound, rhythm, and image--an invasion of aesthetics. More easily than analytic writing, poetry can emancipate itself from the standard definitions of words, enabling a breakthrough to new (and perhaps wayward or even nonsensical) meaning, which can then develop after the fact--different at each new reading. Literary language is presumptuous. It dips into the unknown in order to get nearer to a truth different from that of the superficially visible. As the poet Franz Josef Czernin described it, it is as though one step after another into emptiness could become a ladder. Literary writing can take the writers themselves by surprise; it can disturb and disappoint them--for stirring up turmoil is inherent in metaphor. Thus with every flash of understanding that comes from hearing or reading a poem, the fundamental work of thinking is taken up anew. — Marie Luise Knott

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk. — Sidney Lanier

Idols of the injury,
dug in behind the least understood
motor plan information.
The vile abomination temporal lobes and
The four loathsome memory walls and
The four reasoning, arithmetic beasts
are found for all behind pain and planes.
Portrayed as a house,
Go in, function, cause blindness from
The house's hearing spirit, judgment and
The court's four bronze woes and
The functioning brain lobe wings,
Go in, hearing and perception,
I dig under door fronts, pain and plans. — Bill Ectric

A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever cacophony, it could have a neat and ordered rhyme scheme ... but, if it loses its authenticity, its ability to convey the very heart and soul of the poet, then all the euphony and cacophony in the world cannot make up for the loss of its identity as a poem. And that is the true cacophony. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing. — Shahriar Mandanipour

I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe
but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry
poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs
is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song. — David Byrne

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. — Kim Stanley Robinson

In the front yard lives the oldest thing around, a white oak
That I used to say is my love for the world,
That I now would just call love as it is.
Belonging to nobody, no metaphor, the very. — Coleman Barks

Muse of poetry, come to his aid, I thought. Could the man produce one more metaphor of husbandry? He seemed to be trying.
"Green wood," I suggested, but even he sensed that there was something unfortunate about a metaphor for a king in which you dry out your royalty before you set fire to it. — Megan Whalen Turner

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away. — Claudia Rankine

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma. — Sven Birkerts

Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.
Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems. — Margaret Atwood

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy. — Patricia Hampl

I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying. — Corey Mesler

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

Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide - a thread that runs from source to exhausted release. — Edward Gargan

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

[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

In a sermon I heard recently, the minister claimed that the portrait of God as a storm god (a literary motif that he did not name) in Psalm 97 is based on allusions to the Exodus and is 'not mere window dressing,' that is, metaphoric. As I observed to this preacher later, he used a metaphor in his denigration of metaphor as mere window dressing. — Leland Ryken

The poet ... is the man of metaphor: while the philosopher is interested only in the truth of meaning, beyond even signs and names, and the sophist manipulates empty signs ... the poet plays on the multiplicity of signifieds. — Jacques Derrida

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated. — John Berger

In poetry, the best way to say cuss words is to hide it behind metaphors. — Ymatruz

love was never meant to be
just a metaphor
between the pages of poetry. — Sanober Khan

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,
Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;
Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,
Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;
Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,
Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;
Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her Face
Enchants all those whom once She doth embrace,
Nor is ther any can Her bewty prize
But he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:
Those following Leaves display, if well observed,
How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,
How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;
Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,
Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,
Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie. — James Howell

All war is based in deception (cfr. Sun Tzu, "The Art of War").
Definition of deception: "The practice of deliberately making somebody believe things that are not true. An act, a trick or device entended to deceive somebody".
Thus, all war is based in metaphor.
All war necessarily perfects itself in poetry.
Poetry (since indefinable) is the sense of seduction.
Therefore, all war is the storytelling of seduction, and seduction is the nature of war. — Pola Oloixarac