Jean Genet Quotes

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes

Poetry is not truth, it is the resurrection of presences.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be 'the expression of the imagination': and poetry is connate with the origin of man.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

Eloquence the soul, song charms the senses.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.