Brian Harris Quotes

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

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

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

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.

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.'

I like poems that are complex.

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

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

I like to write poetry.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.