Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Poetry Quotes from famous authors such as Derek Walcott, Mark Strand, Philip Levine, Octavio Paz, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
Ted Hughes is dead. That’s a fact, OK. Then there’s something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed – because that can’t be proven.
2
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
3
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
4
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.
5
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
6
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
7
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
8
I never think about poetry except when I’m writing it. I mean my poetry.
9
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
10
Always be a poet, even in prose.
11
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
12
Around 10 years old I started being into church and being around the church. I started doing poetry – I was doing all clean poetry, totally clean.
13
Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that’s, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it’s going to come.
14
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
15
There’s not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
16
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
17
Wine is bottled poetry.
18
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
19
Poetry is composing for the breath.
20
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
21
I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.
22
We’re all just animals. That’s all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That’s where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
23
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can’t be used for manipulation; it’s why you never see good poetry in advertising.
24
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
25
I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn’t appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
26
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
27
It’s just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?
28
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
29
I don’t think Auden liked my poetry very much, he’s very Anglican.
30
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
31
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
32
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
33
I just submitted what I had to the ‘Octopus Books’ contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.
34
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
35
I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
36
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
37
In school I was sidelined by Tamil language teachers. But in the film industry, I got interested in Tamil poetry after reading and working with the Vairamuthu.
38
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
39
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
40
Well, I had this little notion – I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.
41
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
42
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
43
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
44
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
45
No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
46
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
47
Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don’t care; that’s what poetry is supposed to do.
48
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
49
What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
50
That’s one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one’s little turn – that you’re just part of the great crop, as it were.
51
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
52
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
53
I guess the thing that I’m most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It’s the source of my creativity.
54
A lot of people think, ‘I’ll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn’t work out I’ll go get a law degree, do something else that’s more practical.’ For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.
55
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
56
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
57
I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he’s going to write poetry or songs.
58
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
59
There’s one of my new poems actually – is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
60
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
61
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
62
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
63
As for political poetry, as it’s usually defined, it seems there’s very little good political poetry.
64
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
65
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
66
I don’t think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can’t teach them is the very essence of poetry.
67
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
68
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
69
I’d always loved poetry and I’d always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn’t thought of putting the two together until around that time.
70
Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
71
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
72
Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations… With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.
73
Songs are all poetry, and they don’t make any sense.
74
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
75
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
76
Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
77
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
78
Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can’t dismiss Josey Wales’ quite liberal worldview.
79
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
80
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, just a of questions that I don’t hear other artists asking.
81
Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
82
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
83
Superstition is the poetry of life.
84
Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
85
I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
86
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. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
87
I don’t look on poetry as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
88
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
89
Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.
90
With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
91
Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.
92
My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.
93
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
94
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
95
Why should poetry have to make sense?
96
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
97
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn’t suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
98
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
99
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
100
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
101
I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life – though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.
102
I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
103
Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
104
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
105
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
106
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
107
Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.
108
All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
109
In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.
110
What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.
111
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.
112
You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.
113
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
114
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
115
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
116
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
117
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism – how should poetry escape?
118
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
119
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
120
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
121
The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn’t mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.
122
I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently – his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh – and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs – not only politics but poetry – was very important; he took it as a vocation.
123
It’s bad poetry executed by people that can’t sing. That’s my definition of Rap.
124
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
125
It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
126
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.
127
But for me, being an editor I’ve been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
128
One of poetry’s great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image – things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why – is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.
129
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
130
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
131
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
132
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.
133
Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.
134
In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.
135
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.
136
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
137
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
138
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
139
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
140
There are Behan experts in international universities, but we seem to have forgotten him here in Ireland. He was an extraordinarily gifted writer. His poetry alone is outstanding.
141
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
142
In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
143
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
144
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
145
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
146
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
147
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
148
To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.
149
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
150
The cliche is dead poetry.
151
The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.
152
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
153
Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.
154
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
155
I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
156
I don’t think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don’t come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
157
Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
158
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore – tracking words down to their roots.
159
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
160
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
161
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
162
When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.
163
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.
164
One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.
165
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.
166
At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.
167
I’m no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it’s got everything: it’s a book of poetry, it’s a book of principle, it’s a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.
168
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
169
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
170
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
171
I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
172
And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I’ll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
173
My art and poetry is very political now. Because you’ve got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
174
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
175
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
176
A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.
177
It’s always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It’s hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.
178
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
179
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
180
I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it’s understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don’t have a clue what they’re on about.
181
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
182
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
183
My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I’ve had with opportunities my students aren’t given and how profoundly unfair that is.
184
I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says ‘The Road Not Taken,’ which is a poem by Robert Frost.
185
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
186
In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn’t not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being’s vital essence – a not wholly irrational belief.
187
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
188
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
189
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
190
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
191
I write all the time – I write poetry, I love to write.
192
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
193
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.
194
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
195
I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.
196
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
197
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
198
I’m a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn’t matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They’re the same if you reach the beauty.
199
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
200
Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.
201
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
202
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
203
I write poetry, and I put it to a beat – I mean, that’s what they call rap.
204
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
205
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
206
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
207
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
208
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
209
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
210
I’ll try anything, but the pig testicles in Taiwan were a little much. Eh, it wasn’t half bad. There was this one dish I had there, the translation is, ‘The Monk Jumps over the Fence.’ It’s a fish dish with all these spices. It was beautiful, man – it was poetry. It had a whole story.
211
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
212
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn’t seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
213
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I’d be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
214
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
215
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
216
Actually, I’m working on a book of poetry.
217
Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy.
218
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
219
Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry – and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.
220
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
221
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
222
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.
223
America’s liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.
224
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
225
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
226
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
227
I’m about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don’t know if anybody wants to read it. It’s on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, ‘Okay, that’s another one.’ They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.
228
I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important.
229
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
230
Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
231
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
232
Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.
233
There’s a reason poets often say, ‘Poetry saved my life,’ for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul’s suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
234
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
235
The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
236
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
237
Lucknow, as far as I have heard, is always known for its culture, literature and poetry. So it has set a cultural benchmark for the entire country.
238
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
239
The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
240
Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
241
I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
242
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
243
What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can’t define it.
244
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.
245
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
246
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
247
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
248
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
249
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
250
The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
251
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
252
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it’s Whitman, who lost his job for ‘Leaves of Grass,’ or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose ‘Howl’ was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you’re going to put yourself in jeopardy.
253
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
254
Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.
255
Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
256
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.
257
What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
258
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
259
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I’m very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.
260
We don’t attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.
261
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
262
I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.
263
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
264
I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old and also undertook vocal training since a young age. However, it was only during my time at the University of Oxford did the musician in me came alive.
265
I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys.
266
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
267
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
268
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
269
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
270
Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
271
I think there’s a certain poetry to having your body reflect what you feel inside of you. Perhaps you have a feeling that’s so pure, or overwhelming inside of you that your body disfigures to it – contortions match your confusion.
272
Children can write poetry and then, unless they’re poets, they stop when reach puberty.
273
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
274
Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.
275
You don’t make a poem with ideas, but with words.
276
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
277
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
278
For me, poetry is always a search for order.
279
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
280
One can’t write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don’t like poetry.
281
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
282
Tom Sleigh’s poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
283
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
284
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
285
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
286
Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
287
I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
288
Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.
289
I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
290
I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.
291
Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.
292
We have a motto at Naropa: ‘Keep the world safe for poetry.’ It’s humorous but has some real bite to it. If the world is safe for poetry, it can be safe for many other things.
293
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
294
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.
295
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
296
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
297
Love is the poetry of the senses.
298
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
299
The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.
300
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
301
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
302
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
303
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
304
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
305
If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
306
I didn’t love Jim Morrison ’cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.
307
Definitely, some of the artistry and poetry has been lost in modern chess. It’s very rare that I play a game where I’m like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting. There were so many possibilities! It was such a rich game.’
308
When you’re 15, you’re not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting – not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.
309
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
310
Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.
311
A poem can have an impact, but you can’t expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
312
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
313
Profound thoughts and profound experiences get revealed to be tricks that we play on ourselves, and poetry gets revealed to be just, like, some dumb words that somebody put in an interesting order.
314
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
315
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
316
Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.
317
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can’t imagine ourselves living without.
318
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch’s brew.
319
I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.
320
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
321
When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.
322
Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
323
What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.
324
Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
325
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
326
Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
327
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
328
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
329
I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry – as he wore dashikis and Afros in the ’70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.
330
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
331
I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he’s written poetry then let the verdict be that he’s a poet.
332
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
333
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
334
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
335
I like the beauty of Faulkner’s poetry. But I don’t like his themes, not at all.
336
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
337
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
338
Poetry is meant to be heard.
339
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
340
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
341
Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
342
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
343
There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.
344
I’m a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.
345
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
346
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
347
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
348
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
349
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
350
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
351
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
352
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
353
The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.
354
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.
355
The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
356
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
357
Poetry is the deification of reality.
358
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.
359
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
360
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
361
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
362
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
363
I’ve always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
364
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
365
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah’s ‘Black Reign’ is the album that stands out the most.
366
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
367
If a poem is not memorable, there’s probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
368
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
369
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
370
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
371
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
372
When you’re looking that far out, you’re giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn’t need translation. It’s like poetry, it touches you.
373
I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.
374
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
375
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
376
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
377
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
378
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
379
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
380
You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I’ve decided to create stories through video games.
381
I’m sorry, man, but I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time – and this includes naps – I’m an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.
382
My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.
383
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
384
At this point we’ve answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry… stuff that we like. It’s fun.
385
Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person’s earth lives.
386
My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
387
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
388
I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.
389
I don’t like political poetry, and I don’t write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
390
I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn’t some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that’s happening around us.
391
I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you’d expect, huh?
392
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
393
Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
394
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
395
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
396
To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.
397
There’s a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
398
It’s always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
399
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
400
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
401
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
402
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
403
I have experienced healing through other writers’ poetry, but there’s no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I’ll write a bad poem.
404
There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
405
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
406
With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It’s difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
407
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
408
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
409
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
410
If we ask a vague question, such as, ‘What is poetry?’ we expect a vague answer, such as, ‘Poetry is the music of words,’ or ‘Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.’
411
I’ve often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it’s been doing to my poetry when I’m not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.
412
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
413
One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
414
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
415
My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother’s Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.
416
I go to a lot of writers conferences and literary festivals that tend to be in college towns or cities, and I’m eager to see what happens if those same texts and those same questions move outside of those areas to smaller rural communities where there are surely people who read and love poetry.
417
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
418
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
419
The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
420
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
421
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
422
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It’s delightful to distort size, to see something that’s tiny as though it were vast.
423
Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare – and precious as a pearl.
424
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
425
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
426
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
427
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
428
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
429
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
430
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
431
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I’ve ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don’t say I can write everything well.
432
I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there.
433
I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
434
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
435
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
436
Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.
437
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
438
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
439
Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.
440
I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.
441
Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing it.
442
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called ‘real world’ of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
443
Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It’s been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
444
I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.
445
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
446
Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
447
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
448
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
449
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
450
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry – the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
451
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
452
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
453
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
454
I’m quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.
455
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
456
It would probably surprise people to know that I’m interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.
457
The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.
458
Poetry is not the language we live in. It’s not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn’t the language to which commercial value has been assigned.
459
I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
460
I didn’t know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student – and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin – suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
461
Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.
462
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
463
I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
464
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.
465
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
466
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
467
Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can’t drop that. It’s reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.
468
Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn’t just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.
469
The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.
470
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they’re saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
471
Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
472
I don’t think it’s always good to read lots of poetry.
473
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
474
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
475
I’ve done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I’ve compiled a book of poetry that’s completed, and two others I’m working on.
476
There’s a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves… that never goes away.
477
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
478
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
479
Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
480
I have had much to learn from Sweden’s poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
481
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
482
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
483
But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker’s background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
484
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.
485
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it’s not simply telling a story.
486
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
487
What excites me is that I’m an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life. I think that’s good news.
488
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
489
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
490
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there’s poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
491
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
492
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
493
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
494
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
495
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it’s just obtuse to them. It’s hard to relate to.
