Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history since its statements are rather of the nature of universals whereas those of history are singulars.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history for poetry expresses the universal and history only the particular.

Nobody I think ought to read poetry or look at pictures or statues who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Real friendship like real poetry is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

If food is poetry is not poetry also food?

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

All religion my friend is simply evolved out of fraud fear greed imagination and poetry.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values some of the same techniques.

If you want to see mankind fully look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one and for this reason the family is total poetry.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

Breathe-in experience breathe-out poetry.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Experience has taught me when I am shaving of a morning to keep watch over my thoughts because if a line of poetry strays into my memory my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms dreams or repressions as origins of poetry all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

With Shakespeare and poetry a new world was born. New dreams new desires a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Only in dreams in poetry in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that who knows we are.

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.