How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry Quotes

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, “leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.

The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.

Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song.

There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into the relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art. Shelley says that 'Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader's imagination, the divinity within. The writer and the reader make meaning together. The poet who calls on help from the heavenly muse also does so on behalf of the imaginative reader.

We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us.

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. “Probably

despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself.

Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.

We can only understand what we can name.

am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation”),

These poems have come from a great distance to find you. I think of Malebranche’s maxim, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo,” the seventeenth-century master of haiku, Matsuo Bashō, wrote in a series of insightful reflections on poetry. I would extend Bashō’s wisdom about nature, and about the poetry of nature in particular, to include the particular nature of poetry: learn about poetry from the poem .

There is always something about them that evades the understanding, and I have tried to remain aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, “The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition.