#poetry

Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence. ↗

— Wisława Szymborska

#silence #solitude #imagination

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#oscar-wilde #poetry #reading #age

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday. ↗

— Aaron Neville

#collection #give #i #like #now

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first. ↗

— Jason Newsted

#art #designed #done #enough #first

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#frauds #going #name #poet #point

I hope for a light grief in old age. I was born in Rome and it has returned to me. My autumn was a kind of she-wolf, And August - the month of Caesars - smiled at me. ↗

— Osip Mandel'shtam

#age

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine. ↗

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#idealistic #life #ones #poetry #treated

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#poets #poets-on-poetry #women-poets #art

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. ↗

— Charles Simic

#blanket #enough #into #needle #poem

If I am more alive because love burns and chars me, as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation, it's that he who lays me low is my salvation, and invigorates the more, the more he scars me. ↗

— Michelangelo Buonarroti

#poetry #love