top of page
Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

"The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness."

"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."

"My soul is wrapped in harsh repose,Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes,But soft... behold!A sunlight beamButting a swath of glimmering gleam.My heart expands,'tis grown a bulge in it,Inspired by your beauty...Effulgent."

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."
Explore more quotes by Philip Levine

"I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves."

"No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you."

"I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity."

"If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem."

"I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity."
bottom of page