Dylan Thomas Quotes

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.

You can't write poetry on the computer.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.