‘Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” Plato The image is from a classical sculpture of Plato found on Crete.
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. ~W. Somerset Maugham
“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” ~W.H. Auden
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.” John Keats
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. ~Pablo Neruda, quoted in Wall Street Journal,, 14 November 1985
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry. ~Muriel Rukeyser
“The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.” Sylvia Plath
“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” Anne Sexton
“Written poetry is invisible. Painted poetry has a visible appearance.” Rene Magritte
“Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes ‘the farce we all must play’. But for an instant – because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax – the very...
