Lyric Poetry Quotes

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry. ~ Gregory Orr

And gentle winds and waters near, make music to the lonely ear. ~ Lord Byron

I have so much of you in my heart. ~ Kate Wrath

Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

No one can threaten poetry. It's always been there, always will be. Humans need it to live: it has sustaining powers. How could we (anyone) get through adolescence without some form of song? Song is only a version of lyric poetry that is carried more by melody than by internal coherence and unity. but lyric and song - they are the same. ~ Gregory Orr

I could never understand why people cower from the word storm. Sounds like a good time, to me! ~ Nicole DSettemi

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life. ~ Kevin Hart

Well, poetry - at least lyric poetry - tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self. But everything we want to do these days is an escape from self. People don't want to sit home and think. They want to sit home and watch television. Or they want to go out and have fun. And having fun is not usually meditative. It doesn't have anything to do with reassessing one's experience and finding out who one is or who the other guy is. It has to do with burning energy. When you go to the movies, you're overcome with special effects and monstrous goings-on. Things unfold with a rapidity that's thrilling. You're not given a second to contemplate the previous scene, to meditate on something that's just happened - something else takes its place.

We seem to want instant gratification. Violent movies give you instant gratification. And drugs give you instant gratification. Sporting events give you instant gratification. Prostitutes give you instant gratification. This is what we seem to like. But that which requires effort, that which reveals itself only in the long term, that which demands some learning, patience, or skill - and reading is a skill - there's not enough time for that, it seems. We forget that there is a thrill that attends the slower pleasures, pleasures that become increasingly powerful the more time we spend pursuing them.

SHAWN

Maybe people avoid poetry because it somehow actively makes them nervous or anxious.

STRAND
Mark Strand

Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn't tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur over this, that, and the other. ~ Michael Dirda

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over. ~ Edward Hirsch

We'd like to just write nothing but lyric poetry. The trouble is, the individual is going along intent on his own personal gratifications and love affairs and financial affairs and everything else. But loping alongside him is this fascist lout who keeps trying to take over. And if you keep ignoring him, he gets bigger and bigger, so every once in a while the free individual has to turn away from his private pursuits and give this fascist lout a few clouts, and beat him down to size. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing. ~ James Fenton

There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity. ~ C.M. Kornbluth

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality. ~ Edward Hirsch

Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group. ~ George Orwell

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose. ~ Boris Pasternak

Poetry vs. Goldilocks
A poem should be like the third bowl
of Baby Bear's porridge in the Goldilock's fairy tale.
Neither too hot, nor too cold;
just right for the reader to consume. ~ Beryl Dov

Comedy was something I picked up trying to perfect my art through spoken word. I got on YouTube just to show off my poetry, and then people thought I was funny, so I ran with it. ~ Spoken Reasons

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind. ~ Lauren Oliver

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I asked him then: 'What are you after?'
'To be in hell with you,' he said. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. ~ Philip Larkin

Ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink. ~ Melissa Lee-Houghton

Poetry is language in orbit. ~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry: the best words in the best order. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all. ~ Tom Stoppard

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite. ~ Richard Dawkins

you are a lover of the words
a soul mate to the story
everything becomes a part of you
from my fingertips to your eyes
from my heart to yours ~ Amanda Linsmeier

Get out of my head,
You've overstayed your stay,
This head no longer can spare more thoughts,
Leave my aching heart alone,
You weaved your web all over my heart,
Captured what was never yours,
The aching in my chest can't bare more,
Get out of here,
My soul is no longer a safe place. ~ Tanzy Sayadi

Be the man who has the spirit of a ruthless tiger, ravaging every dusty corner of my soul.
Be the man for whom I will tame myself voluntarily..
Be the man who can make me forget my birth date in moments of utter dellusion.
Be the man whose arms are my harbor, whose lips are my shore, and whose name is my only salvation.
Be the man who erases my past and draws my future with trails of roses and kisses.
Be the man who makes me sigh behind the windows of Poetry, longing to be written.
Be the man whose cigarette's ashes are confounded with mine.
Be the man whose voice moves mountains inside me.
Be the man whose eyes devour the innocence within me with every piercing glance.
Be the man for whom I will transform exceptions into rules.
Be the man who will dare to tear this poem from my hands.
The man who will rewrite with the uncertainty of the futur every single one of my verses. ~ Malak El Halabi

The break-hard
determination to
be a good person,
what happened
to that? How
is it true
I have to
go now? She's lost
my name, but the
occasion of my
presence begs
more. Who is my
mother now I am
unspoken for? ~ Forrest Gander

Rare and powerful harmonies exist,
Shaping both scent and contour in a flower.
Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until,
Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond.
And thus do images of fleeting vision,
Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky,
Once turned to stone live on from age to age,
Held always in a faultless, polished phrase.
("A Sonnet To Form") ~ Valery Bryusov

You are my drug of choice
I know you're no good for me
And though I swear my lips
Will never touch you again
Here we are, here we are. ~ Justin Wetch

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America. ~ Rita Dove

I'm supposed to a man who never blows his composure
A boy trapped in a war, forced to be a solider
The weight of the world just put on top of my shoulders
But if there's one thing I know for sure
It's that my mind has had its exposure
And my emotional turmoil has finally had its closure ~ Tommy Tran

If birth is a manifestation of life, death is another. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Souls speak with each other through poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry. ~ Louis Dudek

He told me to see poetry as a puzzle. It's up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions ~ Jay Asher

For this present, hard
Is the fortune of the bard,
Born out of time;
All his accomplishment,
From Nature's utmost treasure spent,
Booteth not him. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. ~ Pablo Neruda

What grace I have is enough. ~ Theodore Roethke

...you hold a poem
that functions half as personal
note and half as telescope
to the heights
awaiting us all. ~ Kristen Henderson

Cowabunga," said Cassandra, impressed.
Daniel grinned. He liked impressing her.
"'All my being,'" Emma whispered, "'like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw into a dew with poison, is dissolved, sinking through its foundations.'
"That's from a poem," she said with some despair to the crew's stupefied expressions.
"Yeah, Shelley," said Moth. "It's just we don't usually do poetry during jobs. ~ Greg Van Eekhout

I think a lot of America turned to art and culture after Sept. 11. I know the sales of bibles went shooting up, but so did the sales of poetry. I think in a crisis one looks to one's culture, partially to give validation to why one would want that culture to survive. ~ Art Spiegelman

Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that. ~ Elliott Colla

Solitude
There is a charm in Solitude that cheers
A feeling that the world knows nothing of
A green delight the wounded mind endears
After the hustling world is broken off
Whose whole delight was crime at good to scoff
Green solitude his prison pleasure yields
The bitch fox heeds him not
birds seem to laugh
He lives the Crusoe of his lonely fields
Which dark green oaks his noontide leisure shields ~ John Clare

If you don't have at least a working knowledge of the Hawaiian language ... you can't chant well. You cannot ... receive the images of poetry paints for you. It's like having peas and no pod. ~ Keali'i Reichel

A Pause of Thought

I looked for that which is not, nor can be,
And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth
But years must pass before a hope of youth
Is resigned utterly.

I watched and waited with a steadfast will:
And though the object seemed to flee away
That I so longed for, ever day by day
I watched and waited still.

Sometimes I said: This thing shall be no more;
My expectation wearies and shall cease;
I will resign it now and be at peace:
Yet never gave it o'er.

Sometimes I said: It is an empty name
I long for; to a name why should I give
The peace of all the days I have to live?--
Yet gave it all the same.

Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit
For healthy joy and salutary pain:
Thou knowest the chase useless, and again
Turnest to follow it. ~ Christina Rossetti

For spirits like ours, freedom is consumption, transportation on beams of sun ~ Terrence Alonzo Craft

It was never the way she looked
always the way she was
I would have fallen in love with her
with my eyes closed. ~ Atticus Poetry

London
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow;
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse. ~ William Blake

But your own tears blind you to mine.
I am not neglectful of friendship,
but we two squat in the same coracle,
we are both swamped by the same stormy waters,
I have not the gifts of a happy man ... Often enough. ~ Catullus

A snake bites your ankle.
Recoiling, you scream.
Fearing poison, your mind slips into a dream ...
... where a man bites your ankle.
Expecting no guile,
'Again' softly falls from your lips with a smile.
Yet the man and the snake are the same.
Your perception is only to blame. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

There is a defect in us
as human beings
because we think ourselves
a fortress, a mountain, unbreakable
but at the center
in that stillness of being
there is a chasm
of love
which echoes hope, compassion, empathy
try again, it says
and though the fault lines are full of darkness
we are held together by
the optimism and foolishness
of a single spark ~ Nadia Hasan

How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that's probably true. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Even in solitude,
silence stays,
like a loyal supporter,
with its unbroken presence. ~ Santosh Lamichhane

My tactic is to look at you
To learn how you are
Love you as you are
My tactic is to talk to you
And listen to you
And construct with words
An indestructible bridge
My tactic is to stay in your memory
I don't know how
Nor with what pretext
But stay within you
My tactic is to be honest
And know you are too
And that we don't sell each other illusions
So that between us there is no curtain or abyss
My strategy instead is
Deeper and simpler.
My strategy is that some day
I don't know how, nor with what pretext
That finally you need me. ~ Mario Benedetti

Love
by its very nature
is fragile
and that's what makes
true love
so powerful -
you make a fragile thing
strong ~ Atticus Poetry

You complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has _achieved_ an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece of floating poetry. ~ G.K. Chesterton

My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
And every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox. ~ Lisel Mueller

He was always thoughtful and affectionate toward her, and so she was a sweetheart to him. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich