Conrad Aiken Quotes

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

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

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.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

My work should be seen as poetry.

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 is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

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

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

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

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

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

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.