Poetry Essence Quotes

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.

A poem should not mean but be.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.

The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty.

A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common sense, you can only say that it is rubbish; and in actual fact you cannot so examine it at all, because there is something in poetry which is not in the words themselves, which is not in the images suggested by the words 'O windy star blown sideways up the sky!' True poetry is itself a magic spell which is a key to the ineffable.

The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.

A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.