Poetic Thought Quotes

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

In poetic thought, the role of the subconscious is played by euphony.

The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations. The poet avoids the entire vocabulary of logic unless for satiric purposes, and treats words as living creatures with a preference for those with long emotional histories dating from mediaeval times. Poetry at its purest is, indeed, a defiance of logic.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.