Here we have the best Poetry Quotes from famous authors such as Rita Dove, David Hunt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Barton, Nikki Giovanni. Find the perfect quotation from our collection.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream – they go together.
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.
Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Money is a kind of poetry.
I don’t think Auden liked my poetry very much, he’s very Anglican.
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.
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.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
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.
I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don’t say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
I never think about poetry except when I’m writing it. I mean my poetry.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I’d like to publish it someday.
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
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.
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.
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.
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.
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.
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
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.
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.
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’ That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
You don’t make a poem with ideas, but with words.
I’m pretty much all for poetry in public places – poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
Poetry is life distilled.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
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.
When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
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.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
Poetry can’t give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.
I don’t think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
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.’
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories – these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
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.
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.
What I wanted to do in rock ‘n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
The musician – if he be a good one – finds his own perception prompted by the poet’s perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
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.
Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
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.
Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing it.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
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.
My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.
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.
In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
While I’ve had a great distaste for what’s usually called song in modern poetry or for what’s usually called music, I really don’t think of speech as so far from song.
I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
Actually, I’m working on a book of poetry.
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.
That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.
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.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
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.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I’ve experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
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.
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.
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
I write all the time – I write poetry, I love to write.
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.
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.
God is the perfect poet.
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.
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.
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
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.
I’ve already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare – let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Making poetry with a camera – that’s the essence of what I do.
Poetry is the deification of reality.
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.
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
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.
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don’t have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
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.
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
But I don’t think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
I don’t think it’s always good to read lots of poetry.
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
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.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
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.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can’t really think of anyone who’s done anything like it since.
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
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.
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
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.
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.
I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
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.
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you’ll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
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.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
I have had much to learn from Sweden‘s poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief – everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.
There’s a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
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.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
I write poetry, and I put it to a beat – I mean, that’s what they call rap.
Why should poetry have to make sense?
Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
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.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.
Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
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.
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.
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.
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.
I read poetry to save time.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
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.
Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it’s like a jackhammer.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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.
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I’ve always read poetry; I’ve always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
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?
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You’ll have that readership. Keep going until you know you’re doing work that’s worthy. And then see what happens. That’s my advice.
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
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.
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Cotton was a force of nature. There’s a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
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.
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Well – I started writing – probably in the early 60s and by say ’65-’66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published – certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
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.
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
I was writing since I can remember – I just didn’t know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.
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.
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
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.
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.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
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.
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
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.
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
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.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
Every single soul is a poem.
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.
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.
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.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
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.
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
I don’t think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn’t. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
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.
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
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.
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.
Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.
Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
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.
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
I really disliked Philadelphia society – really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
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.
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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.
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
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.
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.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
It all has to do with art – writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry – things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.
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.
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
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.
One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.
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.
I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it’s not all about characters, relationships and themes, it’s also about place and the poetry of place. It’s about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
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.
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.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories – these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
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.
I think I’m a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I’m not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn’t work and why.
I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn’t read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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.
Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don’t want our lives to end.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
There is probably nothing wrong with art for art’s sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
One: whose shoulders do you stand on? And two: what do you stand for? These are two questions that I always begin my poetry workshops with students because at times, poetry can seem like this dead art form for old white men who just seem like they were born to be old, like, you know, Benjamin Button or something.
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
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.
Most people can’t tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
The crown of literature is poetry.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
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.
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.
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.
The cliche is dead poetry.
I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there.
I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I’ve been doing for years before that.
My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they’re embarrassed that I write it or they’re embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
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.
They need to learn poetry. They don’t need to learn about poetry. They don’t need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don’t need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
Often people, when they’re confronted with a poem, it’s like someone who keep saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
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.
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.
One: whose shoulders do you stand on? And two: what do you stand for? These are two questions that I always begin my poetry workshops with students because at times, poetry can seem like this dead art form for old white men who just seem like they were born to be old, like, you know, Benjamin Button or something.
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
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.
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
For me, poetry is always a search for order.
It’s just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
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.
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
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.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
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.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It’s coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.
I gave my voice to poetry.
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
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.
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.
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.
You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I’ve decided to create stories through video games.
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.
My work should be seen as poetry.
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.
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.
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
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.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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.
