Tracy K. Smith Quotes

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

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

It's not easy to define poetry.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

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.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.