Poetic Subtlety Quotes

Usually, the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message.

Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.

I like to write in fairly everyday language - I've always tried to write lyrics that, if people would speak the words, it wouldn't sound like a song.

I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us - and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. - How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!"

The author of haiku should be absent, and only the haiku present.

The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.

In my song you catch at times Note sweeter far than mine, And in the tangle of my rhymes Can scent the eglantine.

Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.

I love lyrics that are not too clever.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.