#poetry

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation. ↗

— Natalie Merchant

#comes #me #poetry #recitation #through

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#poetry #precise #thing

On No Work of Words On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven, The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft. To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark. To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#poetry #reciprocity #writer-s-block #death

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch. ↗

— E. M. Forster

#man #objects #poetry #resides #seek

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time. ↗

— Christopher Fry

#attention #being #drawback #full #give

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives. ↗

— Hamlin Garland

#farmers #ferocious #glamor #light #poetry

This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#mortality #poetry #death

It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson) ↗

— Aidan Chambers

#beauty

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry. ↗

— James Laughlin

#anthology #any #attempt #just #like

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going. ↗

— James Laughlin

#beautiful #beautiful things #belong #book #concrete