The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Tag: poetry, words

Tomas Tranströmer

I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn’t write swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship and drifted away at last through the night sky.

Charles Baudelaire

I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.

Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.The visible carries all the invisible on its back. Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses, what touches me As though I didn’t exist? What is it that keeps on moving, a tiny pillar of smoke Erect on its hind legs, loose in the hollow grasses? A word I don’t know yet, a little word, containing infinity, Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.

Søren Kierkegaard

For with his little secret that he cannot divulge, the poet buys this power of the word to tell everybody else’s dark secrets. A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

James Elroy Flecker

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,Student of our sweet English tongue,Read out my words at night, alone:I was a poet, I was young.Since I can never see your face,And never shake you by the hand,I send my soul through time and spaceTo greet you. You will understand.

Cecil Day-Lewis

A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.

So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.

Margaret Atwood

Where do the words gowhen we have said them?

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

I stalk certain words… I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives… I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves… Everything exists in the word.

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.