Robert Pinsky Quotes

Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.

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 ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

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

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

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

There's something in music that fascinates me - how it communicates emotion so immediately. That's something I wanted in my paintings.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.

poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge

The word "art" means harmony for me. I never speak of mathematics and never bother with the Spirit. My only science is the choice of impressions that the light in the universe furnishes to my consciousness as an artisan which I try, by imposing an Order, and Art, an appropriate representative life, to organize.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.