Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

The Poet is like the prince of the clouds, who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer. Exiled on the ground in the midst of the jeering crowd, his giant's wings keep him from walking.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

I do not care about my own appearance, but I would hope that people could see into my soul, and that is presented better in these photographs than in others. (On his self-portraits)

Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.

At the end of the day, I choose something that makes my heart beat, that I can relate to, that's very complex, or human.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.

What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs.

Any great artist is wrestling with their sadness and loneliness, their fears, anxieties and securities, and they're transfiguring those into complicated forms of expression that affect our hearts, minds and souls and remind us of who we are as human beings, the fragility of our human status and the inevitability of death.