Poetry

Author Observations “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”– Robert Frost “...the best words in the best order.”– Samuel Taylor Coleridge “Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in word.”– Northrup Frye “Poetry is the universal language...”– William Hazlitt “Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.” – William Stanley Merwin

“Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.” – Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.” – Adrienne Rich “Poetry is the doorway to the soul.”– Floria “Poetry is the silent voice that is heard everywhere inside of us...”– Unknown “Words written in verse may speak volumes when those spoken do not.”– Caressia Combs

“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing...” – F. Scott Fitzgerald “Poetry...is...a speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight.”– Sir Philip Sydney “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”– Emily Dickinson

“Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.”– Babette Deutsch “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”– Thomas Hardy

“Poetry” by Marianne Moore 1 1 I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. 2 Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in 3 it after all, a place for the genuine. 4 4 Hands that can grasp, eyes 5 that can dilate, hair that can rise 6 if it must, these things are important not because a 7 high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are 8 useful;

“Ars Poetica” by Archibald MacLeish A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind— A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to: Not true. For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea— A poem should not mean But be.