Poetry Art Quotes & Sayings

An art is a poetry but only a few can read it. — Debasish Mridha

I wish to try my hand at a novel," he said. "Just scribbling, I assure you, but it strikes me as such a noble art, requiring none of the monetary resources of opera or drama, nor the erudition of poetry. Perchance a publisher could be found. I'd be satisfied by the printing of even a score of copies, if only to hold the bound work in my hands. It gives a unique satisfaction, I assume, the writing of a novel. — Kyle Muntz

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. — Curt Sachs

What I would say is this: writing poems doesn't make you a poet. ... It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet. ... . It's a craft. It's an art. It's a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one's life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of "self-expression." ... And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first. — Franz Wright

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities, still willing to invest in art and poetry's own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history. — Aberjhani

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars. — Walt Whitman

The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act. — Don Paterson

All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man — Bernard Berenson

I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led. — Seamus Dever

The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue. — William Cowper

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile? — Aristotle.

I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It's a land of higher ideals. — Frederick Lenz

Art is the heart's explosion on the world. Music. Dance. Poetry. Art on cars, on walls, on our skins. There is probably no more powerful force for change in this uncertain and crisis-ridden world than young people and their art. It is the consciousness of the world breaking away from the strangle grip of an archaic social order. — Luis J. Rodriguez

Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor. — Christopher Caudwell

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things. — Robert Pinsky

Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. — Marianne Moore

Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds. — Harley King

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry. — Simon Armitage

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting. — Edmund Burke

They do not like to hear such expressions as "Negro literature," "Negro poetry," "African art," or "thinking black"; and, roughly speaking, we must concede that such things do not exist. These things did not figure in the courses which they pursued in school, and why should they? "Aren't we all Americans? Then, whatever is American is as much the heritage of the Negro as of any other group in — Carter G. Woodson

Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.. — Dan Sperber

I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I'm not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature - all art really - is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people. — Paul Quarrington

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

If you love beauty, it's because beauty lives within you. If you love art, it's because you are creative. If it wakes up your heart, a receptor for it already exists within you. Your soul is drawn to the things that will help you unfold your most glorious expression. Give in. — Cynthia Occelli

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear. — John Ruskin

To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart. — Aberjhani

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't ask me what it means; ask me how it felt. — Jill Telford

Poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand. — Aimee Mullins

Insomnia

I wonder
If those talks matter
Few done in the clarity of day
Or the many
Done at 3 a.m. in the morning — Irum Zahra

I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go. — Criss Jami

An intelligent man, a man who has a little meditative consciousness, can make his life a beautiful piece of art, can make it so full of love and full of music and full of poetry and full of dance that there are no limitations for it. Life is not hard. It is man's stupidity that makes it hard. — Rajneesh

Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away. — Erik Naggum

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation. — James Joseph Sylvester

Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections ... science is a ladder ... poetry is a winged flight ... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time ... Dante does not efface Homer. — Victor Hugo

Daemonic compulsiveness can kill as easily as it can save.
The true novelist must be at once driven and indifferent. Van
Gogh never sold a painting in his life. Poe came close with
poetry and fiction, selling very little. Drivenness only helps if
it forces the writer not to suicide but to the making of splendid
works of art, allowing him indifference to whether or not the
novel sells, whether or not it's appreciated. Drivenness is trouble
for both the novelist and his friends; but no novelist, I
think, can succeed without it. Along with the peasant in the
novelist, there must be a man with a whip. — John Gardner

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry. — Aberjhani

HEADMASTER: I was a geographer. I went to Hull.
IRWIN: Oh. Larkin.
HEADMASTER: Everybody says that. 'Hull? Oh, Larkin.' I don't know about the poetry ... as I say, I was a geographer ... but as a librarian he was pitiless. The Himmler of the Accessions Desk. And now, we're told, women in droves.
Art. They get away with murder. — Alan Bennett

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said. — Alan W. Watts

People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them - that does not occur to them. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system. — Tony Harrison

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. — Henry David Thoreau

Nas' Illmatic blew my mind when I first heard it. The poetry was done on such a high level that in a way, it validated our existence, our culture. He used the language of the street at the time and made it art. Art tends to be validating. — Erik Parker

Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko ... all believed in the social role of art ... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street ... — John Berger

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone - intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art. — David Foster Wallace

Poetry is more than just art, it's like super glue to a broken heart. It can also be a light when your life seems a little dark. — Delano Johnson

God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble ... The musical art speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart ... Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I loved everything. I read everything. Art and poetry and literature and trash and sci fi. I didn't know what I would become yet and I needed to read to figure it out. — Margaret Cho

My art unkind, my energy all gone blind;The limbs uneven, the face shallower,Because those who I see are not seen,Those who see me are rude indeed. So blow, blow dear winter, just blow along me!
— Santosh Kalwar

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you. — Wendell Berry

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation. — Joseph Brodsky

I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art - be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music - enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised. — Mary Ann Shaffer

Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? — Lucy Grealy

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany. — Chris Jordan

I am the eye that beholds ... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky ... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love. — Solange Nicole

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding. — Immanuel Kant

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting. — Titus Burckhardt

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me - and there are thousands like me - you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. — Virginia Woolf

In every artist there is poetry. In every human being there is the poetic element. We know, we feel, we believe. — Ernst Haas

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. — Samuel Johnson

We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. — Louise Gluck

I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me. — Jenim Dibie

Photography does not form a separate, barren field of art. It is only a means of execution, uniform, rapid and sure, which serves the artist by reproducing with mathematical precision the form and effect of objects and even that poetry which at once arises from any harmonious combination. — Charles Negre

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. — Annie Dillard

Art is not the handmaid of politics. It is its own remedy! And its healing is sacral. — William Everson

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

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent. — Roman Jakobson

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry. — Laura Riding

I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art. — Harold Bloom

Those in whom the faculty of reason is predominant, and who most skillfully dispose their thoughts with a view to render them clear and intelligible, are always the best able to persuade others of the truth of what they lay down, though they should speak only in the language of Lower Brittany, and be wholly ignorant of the rules of rhetoric; and those whose minds are stored with the most agreeable fancies, and who can give expression to them with the greatest embellishment and harmony, are still the best poets, though unacquainted with the art of poetry. — Rene Descartes

We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible nocturnal art of poetry.
We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate. — C.D. Wright

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,

Who was the Future, died full long ago.

Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,

Poor, child, and be not to thyself abhorred.

Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow

And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;

The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord

And the long strips of river-silver flow:

Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.

Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight

About their fragile hairs' aerial gold.

Thou art divine, thou livest, - as of old

Apollo springing naked to the light,

And all his island shivered into flowers. — Trumbull Stickney

Everything here is a small offense and not of value as art or confession. It is not a whim. It is an attempt to peel another putrid skin. — Patti Smith

It is not that complexity is overrated, but is is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it's that the underside grows grungy if it isn't exposed to the change of air;
it is not that the language is exhausted, it is that we run down; it's not that the edge won't cut anymore, it is that the cuts are getting thinner;
it's not that art is artificial, it is that the artists get outright seditty; it's not that literary reputations are not inevitable, it's that they are invented;
not that theories are not beautiful, but that they are feeble — C.D. Wright

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible. — Theodor Adorno

Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities — William T. Vollmann

Happy the bard, (if that fair name belong
To him that blends no fable with his song)
Whose lines uniting, by an honest art,
The faithful monitors and poets part,
Seek to delight, that they may mend mankind,
And while they captivate, inform the mind.
Still happier, if he till a thankful soil,
And fruit reward his honorable toil:
But happier far who comfort those that wait
To hear plain truth at Judah's hallow'd gate — William Cowper

Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting — Edouard Vuillard

We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired...

Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov) — Tom McDonough

To me, photography is not just a visual art, but something closer to poetry - or at least to some poetry, such as the haiku. — Frank Horvat

What I have lately said of painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

For what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear? — Ouida

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony. — Horace Walpole

So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade. — John Dryden

This is that CONSOLATION DES ARTS which is the key-note of Gautier's poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed - as indeed what in our century is not? - by Goethe. You remember what he said to the German people: 'Only have the courage,' he said, 'to give yourselves up to your impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay instructed, inspired for something great.' The courage to give yourselves up to your impressions: yes, that is the secret of the artistic life - for while art has been defined as an escape from the tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the soul. But only to those who worship her above all things does she ever reveal her true treasure: else will she be as powerless to aid you as the mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical nature of Heine. — Oscar Wilde

ERRORS ARE WHAT MAKE US HUMAN. PLOT TWIST: I'M A HORSE. — Amy King

Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. — David Whyte

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. — Walter Pater

When my words are concealed
With lies and disguises, truth and beyond
Insecurities in the veil of trust
Betrayal in bounds of lies
It's just the charm of words darling
Giving the illusion of happiness inside misery — Irum Zahra

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me. — David Foster Wallace

I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama. — Charlotte Saunders Cushman

The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art. — Cesar Vallejo

The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time. — Ali Smith

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans. — Henry David Thoreau

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. — Vladimir Nabokov

It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist. — Ernest Fenollosa

Yet this thou art alive, but if ye soar,
My poor frail heart will have beat out its cry
And sadly miss thy sweet form all the more
While helplessly I stand and watch you die. — Timothy Salter

The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified. — Jonathan Culler

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. — Criss Jami