Sylvia Plath Quotes

I would say everything should be able to come into a poem, but I can't put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can't!

In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

There will always be a place for bunnies to talk in rhyme, but that's not what I do.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

In America there's no way I can make the kind of movie I like to make.

The difference between a top-flight creative man and the hack is his ability to express powerful meanings indirectly.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I never had a problem with genre because a genre actually is like a uniform - you put yourself into a certain uniform. But if you dress up in a police officer's uniform, it doesn't mean that you are an officer; it can mean something else.

My work should be seen as poetry.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

You have to have a certain amount of limitations, I think, to make art and to make something that can be alive on film. Money can get in the way of that.

I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.

I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

Art may varnish and gild, but it can do no more.

Poet: gardener of epitaphs.

A poet's first contract is with truth.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

All poetry is misrepresentation.