Gertrude Stein Quotes

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

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

Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.