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I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Derek Walcott
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While some mothers sing lullabies to their children, my mother read me poetry. And to this day, I associate my strongest and most insistent feelings with words lyrically organized on a page.
Masiela Lusha
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No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.
Alfred Austin
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'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—'
That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down.
Frederik Pohl
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Lemony Snicket: (narrating) Reading poetry, even if you are only reading to find a secret message within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who brought an umbrella on a rainy day, or the only one who knows how to untie knots when you're taken hostage.
Daniel Handler
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Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.
Camille Paglia
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Everything I said he agreed with, which was trying, and his flute playing would make the deaf wince, but I think the real problem with Hyacinth was that he reminded me of myself. He read poetry. He flinched at loud noises. In addition to having no musical skills, he had no martial skills. He avoided any situation that might require physical effort on his part. Seeing him, I found it no wonder that my father despised me.
Megan Whalen Turner
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The only way to get change is not through the courts or — heaven forbid — the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts — music, poetry, dance, painting, writing — can we really reach each other.
Leslie Marmon Silko
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A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.
Stephen Spender
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Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality, a sudden transformation in which words assume a particular influence.
Herbert Read
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We were not for underestimating magic — a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.
Freya Stark
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The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
Jorge Luis Borges
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Whilst Life by Fate is lent to me,
Whilst here below, I stay,
Religion, my sole businesse be,
And Poetry, my play.
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
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It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful, it is marvelously ineffable.
Vanna Bonta
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Poetry is the expression, in human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: in this way it confers authenticity on our time on earth and constitutes the only spiritual task there is.
Stéphane Mallarmé
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For literary purposes, the art of writing poetry can be simply defined as: A creative act using language as a medium refined to an art.
Vanna Bonta
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And then, as you can see, I give greater and greater importance to the materials I use in my work [c. 1936]. A rich and vigorous material seems necessary to me in order to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes. In this way, poetry is expressed through a plastic medium, and it speaks its own language.
Joan Miró
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As in poetry, so in prayer, the whole subject matter should be furnished by the heart, and the understanding should be allowed only to shape and arrange the effusions of the heart in the manner best adapted to answer the end designed. From the fullness of a heart overflowing with holy affections, as from a copious fountain, we should pour forth a torrent of pious, humble, and ardently affectionate feelings; while our understandings only shape the channel and teach the gushing streams of devotion where to flow, and when to stop.
Edward Payson
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Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.
Alfred Austin
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The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
John Steinbeck
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Images are the heart of poetry... You're not a poet without imagery.
Anne Sexton
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The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry.
Elizabeth Gilbert
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I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.
Sam Lipsyte
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Love without Poetry's refining Aid
Is a dull Bargain, and but coarsely made...
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
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Imagine a man in the ditch,
The wheels of the overturned wreck Still spinning—
I don't mean he despairs, I mean if he does not He sees in the manner of poetry
George Oppen
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Faith Baldwin
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