A Quote by William Hughes Mearns

Poetry is when you talk to yourself.

William Hughes Mearns

Quote Topics

Poetry Poetry Is Talk Yourself

Quote Author

William Hughes Mearns
American - Poet
1875 - 1965

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.

Charles Dickens

Poetry connects you to yourself, to the self that doesn't know how to talk or negotiate.

Rita Dove

To write poetry, like sincere poetry, it is like performing heart surgery on yourself without anesthesia...in public...You are peeling back layers. You are dissecting yourself...You do not know what they [the audience] is going to do when you reach into yourself and rip out your organs to be displayed

Amir Sulaiman

When you write a song it's sometimes in a desperate moment whn you can't really articulate it. What I love about lyrics is what T.S. Eliot said: 'Good poetry is felt before it is heard.' I'm a believer in that. It's those moments when you sit yourself down, and talk to yourself in the mirror.

Marcus Mumford

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

Story Musgrave

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

Story Musgrave

Interviews are horrible. All your life you are trained not to talk about yourself. Then you are expected to do nothing else, to talk only of yourself.

Peter Lorre

Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.

Joshua Mohr

For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.

Cornel West

When people decide to talk publicly about poetry as an art form and how it's received, they often get very abject about it: "Nobody reads poetry," and then a thousand people write back, "No, we read poetry." There's an abundance of this negative preaching to the choir, and it's very similar to the experience I'm having.

Eileen Myles

Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Don't talk yourself out of following your heart. Talk yourself into it.

Alan Cohen

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

Larry Wall

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.