An Anatomy of Poetry: Explanations & Realisations

Just some thoughts on poetry I found that I thought I'd share (because I love it so...)  It's good to be reminded sometimes of what it really is. 

(If you want to read some really good poems, join me here: A Poem a Day where I indulge in posting a poem every day from some of the greatest poets out there.)

~Siobhán

'Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.'
~Gustave Flaubert  

 'Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.'

~Mark Strand

'Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.'
~Novalis  

'Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.'
~Robert Frost 

 

 'Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.'  ~Dennis Gabor 

 'Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.' ~ Joseph Roux

'A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.'  ~Wallace Stevens

'If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.'~ Emily Dickinson

'Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.' ~ Carl Sandburg

'Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.'  ~Don Marquis

'Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.'
~Paul Engle

 

'Like butterflies in Spring
Poetry awakens the Spirit,
stirs the imagination and explores
the possibilities with each stroke of its rhythmic wings.'
~Jamie Lynn Morris

'Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart.'  ~Thomas Hill

'Poetry is not an expression of the party line.  It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.'  ~Allen Ginsberg

'Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.' ~Christopher Fry

 

'The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.' ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge  

'Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.' ~John Keats

(How to write poetry?) - 'Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.' - Anne Sexton