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Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

— Allen Ginsberg

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Poetry

More quotes by Allen Ginsberg

Who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall.

HOWL (1955)

Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!

Howl (1956)

The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet.

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

America (1956)

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

America (1956)

All Allen Ginsberg quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Allen Ginsberg (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.