Poetic Communication Quotes

Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it.

Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

We singers have a different level of responsibility from other musicians. We have words that we must convey; we have meanings that we must convey through these lyrics.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

To me, the most poetic and intelligent way to bring up a subject is by showing very simply who you are and what you believe in.

I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

I believe that poetry should communicate.

As a songwriter who uses lyrics to connect with others, it made perfect sense for me to partner with Hallmark, the leading greeting card brand that also uses words to help people make meaningful connections.

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.

Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts.

As oil will find its way into crevices where water cannot penetrate, so song will find its way where speech can no longer enter.

What is the point of narrating poetry when the listener can't appreciate and enjoy the meaning?

I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.

I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.

Without you hearing a melody or music or anything like that, it would say something to you. So, that's what a song is to me. Now, you have a lot of songs that come out, and the beat carries them over there, because of the beat, and because of some other factors and so on and so forth. But I want mine to be a song, if you read it, it's going to mean something to you.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.

The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.