Ars Poetica Quotes

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Ars Poetica

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind's days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other. ~ Kathy Acker

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave. ~ John Keats

I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen. ~ Anna Journey

Ars Poetica II"

I find, after all these years, I am a believer -
I believe what the thunder and lightning have to say;
I believe that dreams are real,
and that death has two reprisals;
I believe that dead leaves and black water fill my heart.

I shall die like a cloud, beautiful, white, full of nothingness.

The night sky is an ideogram,
a code card punched with holes.
It thinks it's the word of what's-to-come.
It thinks this, but it's only The Library of Last Resort,
The reflected light of The Great Misunderstanding.

God is the fire my feet are held to. ~ Charles Wright

To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut. ~ Lynn Emanuel

Divine nature gave us fields, human skill built our cities. -Divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes ~ Marcus Terentius Varro

The award for the most understated booth at AWE went to Occipital, a company that Ars learned about in 2014 when it released the Structure Sensor, a Kickstarter-backed light scanner that could be attached to an iPad for 3D scans of the world around you. Outside ~ Anonymous

The earliest surviving manuscript containing Artephius' 'Ars Sintrillia' is from the seventeenth century, titled 'Artetti ac Mininii Apologia in Artem Magicam' under the heading 'De Scientia Praeteritorum Praesentium ac Futuorum'. This describes the use of three vases of different materials filled with water, wine and oil in which there are semi-precious stones. These are arranged in several ways with candles, and by the reflection of the rays of the sun, moon and stars into the liquids from several instruments, including a sword, make possible various kinds of divination, especially knowledge of the past, present and future ~ Nicholas Clulee

Art for art's sake.
[Lat., Ars gratia artis.] ~ Howard Dietz

The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I was in the midst of it all - saw war where war is worst - not on the battlefields, no - in the hospitals ... there I mixed with it: and now I say God damn the wars - allw ars: God damn every war: God damn 'em! God damn 'em! ~ Walt Whitman

Temporis ars medicina fere est.
Time is generally the best medicine. ~ Ovid

And I think I am about to mistake you for a volume of Ptolemy." He drew her face closer to his. "Make that Ovid," he said. His lips brushed lightly against hers. "Make that Ars Amatoria. ~ Loretta Chase

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

Kids can say anything in a mocking, singsong voice, and make it sound uncool. "You have ears. Nyah-nyah-na-nyah-nyah, you have eee-ars and they're on the side of your fay-ace! ~ Kevin Hart

Arsenal fans are without a doubt the dullest supporters to have visited here for a long time.
They've only got one chant, 'Ars-suh-nul! Ars-suh-nul! Ars-suh-nul' and that was it. But for most of the game they were incapable of even managing that ~ Karl Wiggins

I recall thinking that this paper would be the least interesting paper that I will ever be on." Adleman could not have been more wrong. The system, dubbed RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) as opposed to ARS, went on to become the most influential cipher in modern cryptography. ~ Simon Singh

Fiat ars – pereat mundus", says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of "l'art pour l'art." Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. ~ Walter Benjamin

He printed business cards celebrating his shift. They read, 'Ars gratia pecuniae.' Translated, it meant, 'Art for money's sake. ~ Kliph Nesteroff

& we cannot separate the roof from the heart
from the trees that were there, standing.
& so it is, when I say "night,"
it is your name I am calling,
when I say "field,"
your thousand, thousand names,
your million names. ~ Aracelis Girmay

No doubt but there is none other beeste comparable to the mightie dragon in awesome power and majestie, and few so worthie of the diligent studies of wise men. -Gildas Magnus, Ars Draconis, 1465 ~ Dugald Steer

We took 9000 fans to The Emirates to play Arsenal in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, and we sang non-stop. But the place is a bloody library! About every twenty minutes or so their 40,000 crowd would half-heartedly sing their Ars-suh-nul song, and to encourage them we'd give them a round of applause. But even that didn't work. Whatever we did we couldn't give their fans the much-needed boost they evidently needed to support their own team ~ Karl Wiggins

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands. ~ Harold Bloom