True poetry opens a gateway into another realm. What makes a true poem is not its form, but its power to transform the exterior and interior worlds, and in a single stroke change both the witness and the witnessed in one unified moment. It is a magical lens that teaches us to see behind the lines not only of poetry, but within each moment, revealing the ever-present hidden radiance that is seen only when our vision is restored. Poetry takes us behind the lines of the apparent world of forms and circumstance and shows us that which is the source of all, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” ― Robert Frost
“I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.” ― Arthur Rimbaud
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
“[A poet’s] responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnamable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man.” —James Baldwin
“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it is to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” —Jim Morrison
“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.” ―Gustave Flaubert
“The smallest thing by the influence of eternity is made infinite and eternal.”
―Thomas Traherne
“Each moment is an unforeseeable experience. Each moment demonstrates the absolute mystery of the present.” ―René Magritte
“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in me older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.” ―Robinson Jeffers
“Oh phosphorescence. Now there’s a word to lift your hat to… To find that phosphorescence, that light within — is the genius behind poetry.” ―William Luce (from his play “The Belle of Amherst”)
Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
Howard Nemerov
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
