My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? ---"On death
For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.
For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.
Life is a message scribbled in the dark.
It's often assumed that British actors read Shakespeare and sonnets as we're going to bed at night and we're all very familiar with it.
I am a little world made cunningly.
Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.
The Way is ever nameless.
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
Wallace Stevens: the Platonist celebrates endless change, but with regret.
Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings
Dark is a way and light is a place, Heaven that never was Nor will be ever is always true "Poem on His Birthday
I was not really aware of the dystopian genre before I read 'The Handmaid's Tale.' Many poets as well, like John Donne and Emily Dickinson, would be the influences; I specialized in Emily Dickinson at university. Both of those poets have really interesting ways of looking at life and death.
The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.
Time in the heart and sequence in the brain-- Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine. And let us then take godhead by the neck-- And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.
If, presume not to God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great.
Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.
My dad wanted to name me after Rainier Maria Rilke, the poet.
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
When the rose is gone and the garden faded you will no longer hear the nightingale's song. The Beloved is all; the lover just a veil. The Beloved is living; the lover a dead thing. If love withholds its strengthening care, the lover is left like a bird without care, the lover is left like a bird without wings. How will I be awake and aware if the light of the Beloved is absent? Love wills that this Word be brought forth.
We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works.
Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding.
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
