Meaning of poetry quotes:

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The meaning of poetry has no sureness of direction; is like the sling, it is not under control. -- Rumi
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers. -- Billy Collins
I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings. -- Anne Stevenson
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me. -- Margaret Atwood
For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things. -- Robert Pinsky
Get rid of words and meaning, and there is still poetry. -- Yang Wanli
Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning. -- Stanley Kunitz
Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry. -- Yang Wanli
People who look for symbolic meaning fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the images. -- Rene Magritte
Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'... -- George Chapman
Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose. -- Basil Bunting
If you want meaning, you read poetry or a novel or something, you don't read song lyrics. You're supposed to listen to them with music. -- Roddy Woomble
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. -- A. E. Housman
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out . . .. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. -- A. E. Housman
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life. -- Barry Lopez
Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem. -- Pattiann Rogers
In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. -- Confucius

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