Creatures Quote by Sharon Olds

“You are poetry in perpetual motion capturing my heart with centrifugal force.”

— Truth Devour

A poem doesn’t come out and tell you what it has to say. It circles back on itself, eating its own tail and making…

— Franny Billingsley

“A poem is a heroic act of integration that binds into rough harmony the chorus of forces within and outside the soul. A poem…

— Tony Hoagland

The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out.

— Stevie Smith

One way of ending the poem is to turn it back on itself, like a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

— Maxine Kumin

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically…

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or up-rooting, which pulls the word from the language: the other of gravity, which makes…

— Octavio Paz

A poem is an instant of lucidity in which the entire organism participates.

— Charles Simic

Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annhilation of one…

— Mary Shelley

“Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor.”

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Just as a child is really a thing that wants to become a man, so is the poem an object of nature that wants…

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel