Poetry Quote by Cleanth Brooks

A metaphor cannot be paraphrased

— Percival Everett

“what is poetry, how can I even think of meter, metaphor, as you lie dying, swollen & agonized in your pretty gown”

— Sandra M. Gilbert

“Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.”

— Milan Kundera

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the…

— John Ciardi

Poetry dovetails contradictions.

— Marilyn Hacker

“Poetry provides a vehicle that takes me to places that logic won't go. It is a way of understanding the incomprehensible.”

— John A. Vanek

“…description is deadly to a prose poem.”

— Russell Edson

“Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies”

— Oscar Sparrow

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the…

— H. P. Lovecraft

“I clearly understand, first, that the real human being is a poet and, second, that [the tyrant] is the incarnate negation of a poet.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“In the sentences of poetry prosaic words should serve only as detours to a greater poetic expression, both abstruse & plain.”

— the mag man

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is…

— Steven Pinker