Poetic Irony Quotes

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.

If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way - I was always drawn to that.

Judy Blume excels at describing how it feels to be invisible. So how poetic is it that Blume herself is suddenly everywhere?

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo.

Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button the bright splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep. War is kind.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

I like poems where you don't really know whether to laugh or cry when you read them.

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

I intend 'Dämmerung' to be an ironic meditation on the financial rewards of poetry and a tragicomic lament on the passing of time and the changes in literary taste. The other poets mentioned are my poetic cohort from the U.K. I wrote the piece in situ, as it were, while making a television documentary about World War I in Germany.