Narrative Poetry Quotes & Sayings

As there is no narrative, his poetry has been described as lyrical. As A. J. Smith observes, 'The most directly influential body of lyric poetry in European literature Il Canzoniere of Petrarch consists of some three hundred and eighty sonnets, madrigals and canzoni, sensitively registering every nuance of the poet's forty-seven-year devotion to one Laura. — Brenda Liddy

Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely. — Ted Hughes

To get the whole story of Jesus, we must be regularly reading and teaching the whole book - New Testament and Old, narrative, poetry, Gospels, apocalyptic, Epistles, Wisdom Literature, prophecy - all of it! All the parts work together, in God's providence, to feed us fully on this one who comes and tells us that he is the living water and the bread of life. — Gloria Furman

An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age. — William C. Brown

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets. — Diane Wakoski

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse. — Robert Morgan

I like to move around in the landscape between poetry and prose, between the lyrical and the narrative. — Rigoberto Gonzalez

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. — John Berger

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it. — Julianna Baggott

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time. — Matthew Pearl

I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in." ~from an interview in Narrative magazine — Donald Hall

I don't really think in terms of the future of literature. I think literature will be around "forever" - but in a relatively niche way, like jazz and poetry, although probably more widely consumed than jazz and poetry since it's fundamentally a narrative form. And I think that's important and places like Word Riot and The New York Tyrant and n+1 will be responsible for keeping it alive. — Nick Antosca

The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such. — Ron Silliman

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms. — Elizabeth Bowen

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. — John Drinkwater

Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.
To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance ( ... ) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection. — Richard Hugo

If my life was pulled into the pages of a book, there would be coffee stains and wrinkles along the lines of that narrative. Because all I can wish is that the book of my life would be well read and well loved. Living within words and the sound of writing. — F.K. Preston

There's a great freedom of forms and intonations in Luigi Fontanella's poetry. He doesn't take a strong formal stand; his poetry entertains moments of nearly proselike colloquial narrative along with moments of powerful lyrical tension. There is a movement of extremes, from powerful tonality to near atonality, and I like this a great deal; it's a stance that very effectively catches the spirit that makes work in poetry possible nowadays. — Giovanni Raboni

A play's got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It's not music, it's not poetry, it's not dance, it's not narrative - it's dramaticit's about conflict. It's about forces coming together. — Romulus Linney

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. — Henry David Thoreau

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. — Eugenio Montale

So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something. — Sylvia Plath

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire. — Peter Ackroyd

Poetry, for me, conveys the essence of narrative rather than its particulars. — Delia Sherman

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry. — Dylan Thomas

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message. — Andrei Tarkovsky

I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative switftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience. — Bernard Herrmann

Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time. — Eleanor Catton

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc. — Juan Goytisolo

Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight ... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty. — Stephanie Mills

We can instantly map the usage of the word 'raven' across the United States, in works of narrative poetry, written by men in their thirties. but only up to 1923. When it comes to the last century, save if new law affords entry, then the lawyer - dark-robed sentry - who is ever at our door, will yet whisper, "Nevermore! — Erez Aiden

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion. — Carol Ann Duffy

THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction. — Orson Scott Card

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader. — Ron Rash

Charles Bernstein's pairs of jingles of 'public discourse' are 'simultaneous double narrative / the space between's the other narrative/as if they're opposite.' In the space between, outside representation but in the 'presence' of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range that's public and mind at once and inseparable, that is 'Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.' Girly Man is doing it. — Leslie Scalapino

Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pull
back the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,
human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatness
of this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewn
across the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist - my
soul purpose. — Brian Bowers

Hardy's astonishing technical versatility has won the admiration of major poets from Ezra Pound and Cecil Day Lewis to Philip Larkin. Among other genres he employs the lyric, narrative, ballads, and the sonnet. He also moves easily between the amplitude of dramatic monologue and the compression of imagism. He experiments continually with an ingenious variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes, rejecting the fluidity of contemporary poetry for his own idiosyncratic style, based on a real understanding of the variety of speech rhythms and registers. Each individual poem is designed to express in its language and form, and with utter honesty, Hardy's impressions of life. — Geoffrey Harvey

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. — Steven Pinker