Quotes About Poetry and God

Son of man, can these bones live?
—Ezekiel, 37:3

 

“There used to be gods in everything
and now they’ve gone….”
— Howard Nemerov in “The Companions

 

“What use to learn the lessons taught by time
if a star at any time might tell us: Now.”
Howard Nemerov in “The Consent”

Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.  ~John Keats

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.  ~Richard RosenIt is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.  ~Stephen Mallarme

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats

Who can tell the dancer from the dance?  ~William Butler YeatsMost painters have painted themselves.  So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously.  Some have done nothing else.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.  ~Thomas Babington MacaulayPoetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.  ~Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.  ~Thomas GrayHe lives the poetry that he cannot write.  The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.  ~Oscar Wilde

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.  ~Robert Frost

I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.  ~Robert Frost, 1935

A true poet does not bother to be poetical.  Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.  ~Jean Cocteau

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.  ~Carl SandburgThe poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.  ~Jean Cocteau

I was born to catch dragons in their dens
And pick flowers
To tell tales and laugh away the morning
To drift and dream like a lazy stream
And walk barefoot across sunshine days.
– – – – James Kavanaugh “Sunshine Days and Foggy Nights”

 

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
– – – -Mark Stran