Break Quote by Sheila Bender

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

— C. K. Williams

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

— Laura Riding

...poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths...

— Anonymous

Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.

— Erica Jong

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

— Gaston Bachelard

Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and…

— John Ashbery

Poetry can keep life itself alive. You can endure almost anything as long as you can sing about it.

— James Wright

“Poetry will die when love and pain cease to exist.”

— Kellie Elmore

“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of…

— Jim Carroll

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

— Gaston Bachelard

Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death

— Ruben Dario

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being,…

— T. S. Eliot