Paul Valery 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.

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

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

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.