Quotes About Love .

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: 21 Quotes About Love Li St. Michael

Love was an equal opportunity employer long before the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s. There are countless quotes about love on the web; mostidentify with the human reactions to loveinstead of love’s absolute nature. An ever-present theme in many quotes about  love is that love brings out the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of human nature. In many cases, these so-called quotes about love are really telling the tales of human imperfection as it pushes against the glass of an easily obtainable but unrecognizable door. 

Here are 21 quotes about love that give voice to all of these ideas.

1. “All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.”- Andre Breton, French writer

2. “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward in the same direction.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French writer

3. “Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”- H. L. Mencken, American journalist

4. “Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.” - Anais Nin, French/Cuban author

5. “A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears.”- Woodrow Wyatt, British journalist

6. “If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning 'Good morning' at total strangers." - Maya Angelou, American poet

7. “Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”- Iris Murdoch,British author

8. “The eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.”- Margaret Atwood, Canadian novelist

9. “At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”- Plato, Greek philosopher

10. “Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.”- Helen Rowland, American journalist

11. “Love does not dominate; it cultivates.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer

12. “Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.”  - Swedish Proverb

13. “Love is the poetry of the senses.”- Honore de Balzac, French Novelist and Playwright

14. “One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.” - James Earl Jones, Actor

15. “Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”- George Bernard Shaw, Irish Playwright

16. “Never let a problem to be solved become more important than the person to be loved.”- Barbara Johnson, Literary Critic

17. “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”- Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher

18. “To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.”- Francois Mauriac, French Author and NobelPrizelaureate

19. “Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.”- Franklin P. Jones, reporter and humorist

20. “The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned.” - William Somerset Maugham, English Playwright and novelist

21. “A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.”- Ingrid Bergman, actress

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Poetry about Nature | Elizabeth Bradfield .

Introspection and Poetry About Nature

Poetry about nature has the magnificent ability to evoke both the loud and majestic as well as the solitary and quiet beauty of nature.  Poems about nature celebrate the natural world around us but also allow for poets to be introspective.

Many poets who write poems about nature use the natural world to reflect upon their personal relationships—with the world, with friends, with themselves.  Two such poets include Elizabeth Bradfield and Mary Oliver.

Elizabeth Bradfield is a Cape Cod based poet whose poetry often reflects maritime adventures, the ocean, and living in Massachusetts.  Her poem “Concerning the Proper Term for a Whale Exhaling” beautifully and simply weaves nature into a story about whale-watching with her mother and father. 

http://www.ebradfield.com/poems/proper.shtml

Poof my mother sighs
as against the clearcut banks near Hoonah
another humpback exhales, its breath
white and backlit by sun.

Though the poem describes a family event and its ensuing interaction, Bradfield uses the backdrop of the ocean and language of whaling, which is connected to the history of Massachusetts and the Cape in particular, as a backdrop.  By doing this, she opens a personal experience into a story of interconnectedness through the history of place.

American poet Mary Oliver, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, American Primitive, is famous for her poems about nature.  Having lived in New England, many of her poems evoke the landscape of trees changing color during seasonal shifts and sounds of birds and animals as they live their lives.

In Oliver’s poems about nature, she manages to access a quiet reflection upon human existence. Oliver has spoken about her creativity is spurred by nature, by taking long walks and noticing the way the world interacts and making connections between the simple things found in nature with the grander scheme of life.

A great example would be Oliver’s poem, “Bone,” which is also a poem that features the ocean.  She opens the poem with a direct address to her reader explaining her search to understanding “what the soul is.”  While walking on the beach, the narrator finds an ear bone of a whale, and the poem works to draw a connection between the ear bone and the soul, postulating,

“the ear bone

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale

 … the soul

might be like this

so hard, so necessary”

http://thewritersworkspace.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/bone-by-mary-oliver/

Again, as Oliver’s poem reacts to nature and brings nature into the poem, she uses finding something from nature—in this case, the ear bone of a whale—to explore the individualistic experience of being one person living within an encompassing world, but also establishing undeniably we are linked with other creatures and with the world around us.

Both Mary Oliver and Elizabeth Bradfield celebrate the beauty of the natural world around us, often finding a small, easily overlooked item—the ear bone, the sound a whale makes—to remind us of how much we are a part of something bigger.  Both poets show how poems about nature allow for an intimacy to come into the poem, but speak to the power of sharing these intimate moments.

More Detail Please visit www.worldpoetrymovement.com

 

Poetry about life | Sylvia Plath .

When writing poetry about life, it’s tempting to attempt a poem on big, life-changing events.  But many times, the most uniquely touching poems are the ones that explore small, tender moments of life.

Sylvia Plath’s “You’re,” for example, is a lovely poem reflecting a mother observing her child.  This is an example of how poetry about life can surprise and delight us.  Plath opens with an unforgettable image, the title “You’re” leading to:

“Clownlike, happiest on your hands,   

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,   

Gilled like a fish.”

Perhaps poetry about life is so wonderful because these poems seem the most effortless.  But admittedly, this effortlessness can be a struggle to create.  How to appropriately capture that sweet happiness of watching your baby crawl without sounding trite, or like a Hallmark card?

In “You’re,” Plath played to her strengths, piling up very original (Plathian, if you will) descriptive imagery and similes—(“gilled like fish,” “mute as a turnip,” “jumpy as a Mexican bean.”) to a very Plathian rhythm, which you can see in more famous Plath poems such as “Daddy.” 

Imitation is a great exercise, a way to challenge and flex your writing muscles, but in writing poetry on life, it tends to pay off to be true to your voice.  One of the reasons why “You’re” is so beautiful, because as readers, we can feel Plath throughout the poem, but the emotion is joyful and celebratory.

Not all of us are fortunate enough to have such an identifiable voice as Plath’s, and of course personal voice is something that is constantly being worked and discovered.  To counter the tendency to become too philosophical or heady when writing, focusing on an image, a descriptive moment, is a way to access emotion without having to explicitly state it. 

Again, Plath does this in her opener, immediately recalling a joyful, specific memory of childish play, and then from there moves onto explore the more complicated emotions of being a mother, of having a child. 

The emotional power of a poem often lies in the expansiveness of a moment, which the poet translates into lines.  “You’re” is a loving and even silly poem.  But looking closer at the words and images that Plath chooses, we find a bit of that maternal fear and uncertainty that comes with having a child, seen in the line “[v]ague as fog and looked for like mail,” or the eeriness of her comparison to “[a] creel of eels, all ripples.”

Meanwhile, if you’re stuck in a rut and finding it hard to be inspired to write poetry about life, I find actively being in the world is a great source of inspiration.  Living in New York City, I love the moments that come about when eavesdropping on the subway, what the conversations between two middle-school girls can trigger in my mind, or watching a father interacting with his toddler daughter on a playground.  There are lovely moments all around, ready for us to turn them into poetry about life.

More Detail Please visit www.worldpoetrymovement.com