Christopher Fry Quotes

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

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

When we talk to somebody and we want to be nice or polite or show our more beautiful side, we try to use the best words that we know. This is what poets are doing. They are cleaning the words, they are inventing the sentiments, they are giving us a way to communicate.

I turn to poems to find spaces that might enlarge, rather than distill, experience.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life.... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death--subjects as ancient as humanity--these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak.

Sometimes only poetry can say it. I think there's just this deeper language, and away of putting your world back together again and breaking through barriers.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.

poetry is where the language is renewed.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.