Poetic Imagination Quotes

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

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

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.

Science is not addressed to poets.

I have devoted myself to architecture as a sublime act of poetic imagination. Consequently, I am only a symbol for all those who have been touched by beauty. The words Beauty, Inspiration, Magic, Spellbound, Enchantment, as well as the concepts of Serenity, Silence, Intimacy and Amazement, all these have nestled in my soul. Though I am fully aware that I have not done them complete justice in my work, they have never ceased to be my guiding lights.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language - either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.

The freedom of poetic license.

My heroes are, above all, the great 19th-century Americans: Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and the others. I love the way they think.

To see the Persia of poets and painters, hiding in plain sight behind the much-maligned Iran of our newspaper headlines, would be my fondest wish.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.