We have collected the best Poetry Quotes by famous authors including George Murray, Martha Nussbaum, Robert Wilson, Russell Baker, Matthew Arnold and many others, we hope that among them you will find the right thought.
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
George Murray
I really disliked Philadelphia society – really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.
Martha Nussbaum
My work should be seen as poetry.
Robert Wilson
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
Russell Baker
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold
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.
Tom Hanks
Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don’t have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there’s poetry written right on the bathroom wall.
Ani DiFranco
The claims I’m making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We’re much more relaxed around those art forms. We’re willing to ask, ‘How could this find a place in my heart?’
Alain de Botton
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
John Barton
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.
Robert Morgan
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
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.
Aristotle
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
James Broughton
Love is the poetry of the senses.
Honore de Balzac
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.
Judy Collins
The crown of literature is poetry.
W. Somerset Maugham
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
Peter Davison
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
William Cullen Bryant
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.
Julio Cortazar
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.
Jim Peebles
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.
Eminem
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.
Brit Marling
I don’t think Auden liked my poetry very much, he’s very Anglican.
Stevie Smith
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Patrick White
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
John Drinkwater
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you’ve ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you’re already on the way to poetry. It’s about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
Rita Dove
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
Philip Levine
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
Robert Penn Warren
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.
Charles Baudelaire
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Philip Levine
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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.
Maya Angelou
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.
Patrick Kavanagh
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
June Jordan
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
Eavan Boland
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.
Lorde
Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.
Richard Eberhart
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.
Eavan Boland
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
Diane Wakoski
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
Susan Vreeland
Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords – philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.
Anna Jameson
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Omari Hardwick
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
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.
Norman MacCaig
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
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.
Billy Collins
I always liked the magic of poetry but now I’m just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they’ve used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
David Knopfler
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
David Carradine
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I’m not kidding.
Harry Mathews
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.
Tracy K. Smith
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Jerry B. Jenkins
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.
Allen Tate
I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
David Means
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
Eavan Boland
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
Octavio Paz
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
John Ciardi
Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
A. R. Ammons
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.
T. S. Eliot
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
Felix Dennis
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.
James Tate
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.
Eminem
I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
Mark Strand
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch’s brew.
Anthony Hecht
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.
Henry Grunwald
Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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.
Tracy K. Smith
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.
Jack Bowman
I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
Michael Graves
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
Edgar Allan Poe
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.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Jenny Zhang
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.
John Drinkwater
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand
Poetry always runs away from you – it’s very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.
Abbas Kiarostami
I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.
Satya Nadella
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!
Ellen Key
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
Mark Strand
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
Allen Ginsberg
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
Peter Davison
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.
Edward Hirsch
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.
John Drinkwater
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
Billy Collins
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.
Lafcadio Hearn
Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There’s huge, visionary poetry in it.
Simon Callow
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.
Aaron Lazar
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Aristotle
I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.
Joy Harjo
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
Helen Dunmore
Poetry is meant to be heard.
Mary Oliver
Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it’s like a jackhammer.
Bette Midler
I approach video games the same way I approach theatre, filmmaking, poetry, or painting. I wish more people would take that point of view. It would help the industry to move on.
David Cage
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.
Bertrand Russell
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
Jim Harrison
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.
Richard Dawkins
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
M. H. Abrams
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.
Anna Quindlen
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
John Cage
I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.
Annie Lennox
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
George Oppen
I’ve always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
Jeffery Deaver
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.
Lascelles Abercrombie
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Harry Mathews
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
Paul Auster
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
Michael Eric Dyson
Poetry is the deification of reality.
Edith Sitwell
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.
Marlon James
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.
T. S. Eliot
Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read – Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier – were rhyme poets. That’s what captured me.
Marv Levy
What a great poem teaches you – and it’s not intellectual at all – is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.
W. S. Merwin
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.
James Broughton
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.
Michelle Obama
Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.
Jack Prelutsky
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.
Lascelles Abercrombie
I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.
J. Carter Brown
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.
Tracy K. Smith
Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.
Alissa Quart
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.
E. M. Forster
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet’s language at that point in history, and so it’s even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
Diane Wakoski
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Jim Morrison
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
Peter Davison
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.
Kehinde Wiley
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.
John Drinkwater
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
Eugenio Montale
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.
Ed Koch
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Wislawa Szymborska
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Walter Savage Landor
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
Mary Oliver
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
Robert Morgan
Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.
Christian Louboutin
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot
Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare – and precious as a pearl.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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.
Paul Muldoon
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
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.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Lafcadio Hearn
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.
Amanda Gorman
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
James Broughton
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.
Rita Dove
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
Isaac Rosenberg
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert
I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.
Felix Dennis
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.
Tom Hodgkinson
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.
Rene Auberjonois
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.
Rita Dove
No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry – to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.
Knut Hamsun
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.
Eugenio Montale
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.
Patti Smith
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Muriel Rukeyser
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.
Steven R. McQueen
We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.
Jack Prelutsky
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
David Antin
By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
Lascelles Abercrombie
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Robert Frost
Poetry is composing for the breath.
Peter Davison
Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief – everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
F. Sionil Jose
In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
Phyllis McGinley
My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn
If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
Robert Graves
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Margaret Walker
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.
Robert Morgan
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Wilfred Owen
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
Rita Dove
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.
Roberto Benigni
I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn’t poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
J. Milton Hayes
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
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?
Felix Dennis
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.
Russell Simmons
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.
Andrea Bocelli
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn’t. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
Jack Prelutsky
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.
John Betjeman
On the other hand, if there’s an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I’ve lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
Richard Serra
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.
Anne Waldman
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
Vanessa Redgrave
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.
Victor Hugo
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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
Arnold Palmer
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.
Kenneth Koch
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
You don’t help people in your poems. I’ve been trying to help people all my life – that’s my trouble.
Charles Olson
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.
C. K. Williams
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Wilfred Owen
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.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
Karl Shapiro
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.
Archibald MacLeish
I write poetry, and I put it to a beat – I mean, that’s what they call rap.
Lakeith Stanfield
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.
Sally Kirkland
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
James Dickey
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
Paul Muldoon
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.
Lucille Clifton
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.
Kenneth Koch
Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn
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.
George William Curtis
I write all the time – I write poetry, I love to write.
Colin Quinn
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they’re more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven’t the least idea of where poetry is going.
James Laughlin
Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream – they go together.
Nikki Giovanni
It’s not easy to define poetry.
Bob Dylan
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
Eugenio Montale
‘Blue Velvet’ changed my life forever. It was like I’d always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn’t been reached before.
Joe Wright
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.
Charlie Sheen
I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.
Rafael Moneo
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
Paul Dirac
I didn’t know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
Donovan
Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.
Maya Angelou
Songs are all poetry, and they don’t make any sense.
A. A. Gill
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
Joseph Roux
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Rita Dove
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
Peter Davison
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.
Faith Ringgold
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.
Trevor Dunn
Some people ask, ‘How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?’ I say, ‘My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.’
Mahmoud Darwish
There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Diane Wakoski
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Niels Bohr
I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.
Henry Austin Dobson
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
Muhammad Iqbal
All those authors there, most of whom of course I’ve never met. That’s the poetry side, that’s the prose side, that’s the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you’ve enjoyed.
Norman MacCaig
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Lionel Trilling
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.
Robert Morgan
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
William Blake
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.
Johnny Depp
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.
Mark Strand
My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.
Pankaj Kapur
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.
Tracy K. Smith
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves
Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.
Lisel Mueller
I’m not a rock star writing poetry. I don’t feel like a rock star and I don’t know what one is, actually. I’m a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.
Gord Downie
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.
Charles Baudelaire
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
Isaac Rosenberg
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.
Billy Collins
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
Walter Jon Williams
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.
Jim Jarmusch
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.
Phil Elverum
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
Seamus Heaney
Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
Goldwin Smith
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
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.
Adrienne Rich
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
Carol Ann Duffy
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.
Howard Nemerov
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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.
Gabrielle Aplin
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.
Marv Levy
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
Goldwin Smith
I’m happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Billy Collins
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.
Patti Smith
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Robert Fitzgerald
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Jacques Maritain
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.
Louis Kronenberger
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John F. Kennedy
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
James Broughton
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.
Allen Ginsberg
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.
June Jordan
A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.
Justin Cartwright
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
John Drinkwater
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.
Mark Strand
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Robert Frost
I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Lucille Clifton
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they’re the things that sustain us. And they’re the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
Rita Dove
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.
Tracy K. Smith
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.
Basil Bunting
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost
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.
Alfred Nobel
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.
June Jordan
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.
Romesh Gunesekera
Superstition is the poetry of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn’t think so.
Norman MacCaig
I don’t like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
Anne Stevenson
I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
Kenneth Koch
I never think about poetry except when I’m writing it. I mean my poetry.
Norman MacCaig
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Robert Hass
Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like ‘Kaddish’ and ‘Howl,’ you can hear a cantor between the lines. It’s fully alive, and I think that’s what’s missing in modern poetry. It’s too dry and cerebral.
Derek Walcott
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
Dennis Gabor
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
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.
A. E. Housman
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.
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
James Schuyler
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.
Maya Angelou
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.
Howard Nemerov
It’s bad poetry executed by people that can’t sing. That’s my definition of Rap.
Peter Steele
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.
Jose Saramago
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.
Archie Shepp
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Georges Braque
I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn’t agree with Bly that it’s a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
James Laughlin
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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.
James Schuyler
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
Philip Levine
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Edward Young
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.
Terrance Hayes
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.
Stevie Smith
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
Joseph Roux
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.
Clint Smith
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.
Arca
I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.
Jamila Woods
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.
Story Musgrave
Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.
Philip Schultz
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Marianne Moore
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one’s own understanding of how to understand the world.
Peter Davison
There’s a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that’s a bit blurred in my mind.
Bo Burnham
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.
Philip Levine
Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.
Joseph Roux
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
Lascelles Abercrombie
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.
Langston Hughes
PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Billy Collins
Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I’m a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?
Jay-Z
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Pablo Neruda
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
C. K. Williams
I was writing since I can remember – I just didn’t know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.
Amanda Gorman
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
Boris Pasternak
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Dorothea Dix
Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
Peter Davison
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.
Anne Stevenson
Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Bruce Cockburn
I am grateful for – though I can’t keep up with – the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
A. R. Ammons
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Margaret Atwood
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.
Soren Kierkegaard
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Seamus Heaney
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
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.
Charles Bukowski
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Sarah Kay
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
Mahmoud Darwish
Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it’s timeless, that it reaches back.
Robert Morgan
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.
Paramahansa Yogananda
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
John Holmes
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Paul Auster
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by – the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
Tracy K. Smith
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.
Sylvia Plath
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.
George Murray
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
David Hare
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.
William Hazlitt
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.
John Drinkwater
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Jim Carroll
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
John Barton
Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.
Cheryl Hines
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.
Adam Braun
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
Seamus Heaney
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.
Donald Hall
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have ‘trained’ or ‘practised’ enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
James Fenton
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.
Hart Crane
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath
That’s a wonderful change that’s taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
A. R. Ammons
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.
Octavio Paz
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.
Azar Nafisi
I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
Abraham Verghese
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.
Peter Davison
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
Derek Walcott
Poetry is the deification of reality.
Edith Sitwell
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
Wilfred Owen
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
John Drinkwater
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
Theodore Sturgeon
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
John Ciardi
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Lascelles Abercrombie
There’s a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves… that never goes away.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
Anatole Broyard
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.
James Fenton
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Seamus Heaney
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.
T. S. Eliot
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.
Jim Morrison
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.
Marilyn Hacker
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.
Saint-John Perse
Actually, I’m working on a book of poetry.
Marv Levy
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
Charles Simic
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.
Yusef Komunyakaa
At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Phil Ochs
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.
Billy Collins
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
Denis Diderot
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
Eugenio Montale
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.
Chaim Potok
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
Lady Gregory
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Adrienne Rich
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
Seamus Heaney
I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
Pink
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.
W. H. Auden
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don’t by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
Robert W. Service
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
William Blake
Making poetry with a camera – that’s the essence of what I do.
Denis Villeneuve
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it’s just obtuse to them. It’s hard to relate to.
Jewel
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.
Billy Collins
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.
James Laughlin
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
Robert Creeley
Money is a kind of poetry.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Anthony Hecht
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.
Corin Nemec
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.
Thom Gunn
Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I’m tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.
Julian Baggini
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
Matthew Arnold
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.
Steven Adams
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.
Robert Adamson
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.
Marcus Mumford
This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.
Joseph Brodsky
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.
Erica Jong
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.
Rita Dove
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.
Horace Walpole
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
James Dickey
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.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Mark Strand
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
Gordon Getty
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
Frederick William Robertson
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis
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.
John Masefield
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
Billy Collins
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.
Tara Westover
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.
Mary Oliver
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
Paul Muldoon
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
A. R. Ammons
Children can write poetry and then, unless they’re poets, they stop when reach puberty.
Dennis Potter
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
Umberto Eco
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Walter Scott
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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.
Octavio Paz
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.
June Jordan
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo
People think of poetry as a school subject… Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don’t have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Billy Collins
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.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Mary Oliver
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.
Steven Wilson
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.
Russell Baker
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Jesmyn Ward
You just go where poetry is, whether it’s in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there’s live poetry or recordings.
Joy Harjo
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
Federico Fellini
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
Omari Hardwick
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Richard M. Nixon
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.
Story Musgrave
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.
Lucille Clifton
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
Alice Walker
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Seamus Heaney
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand
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.
John Drinkwater
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
Mark Strand
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
Muhammad Iqbal
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.
Harry Mathews
A poem can have an impact, but you can’t expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
Douglas Dunn
There’s a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that’s a bit blurred in my mind.
Bo Burnham
I like poems that are little games.
Peter Davison
If you don’t mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there’s no poetry in that.
Glen Hansard
I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one’s done it this way.
Kenny Loggins
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
George Will
I don’t think it’s always good to read lots of poetry.
Amber Tamblyn
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.
Patti Smith
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
Eugenio Montale
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates
Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.
Marilyn Hacker
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
Giorgos Seferis
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
James Dickey
We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
Jim Harrison
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
Charles Simic
I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
Jonathan Galassi
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.
Ananya Birla
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.
Robert Morgan
It’s just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?
Robin Wright
Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire
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.
Wallace Stevens
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
Kapil Sibal
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
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.
Amanda Gorman
Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
John Gabriel Stedman
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
Peter Davison
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg
There is a great deal of freshness and charm in ‘400 Blows.’ There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut’s camera looks at his beloved city.
Amitava Kumar
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.
Zeenat Aman
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.
John Barton
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.
Taika Waititi
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Marianne Moore
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you’re a professor, and one frankly doesn’t get a lot of girls as a poet.
Jeffery Deaver
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.
Eminem
You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I’ve decided to create stories through video games.
Yoko Taro
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
Carol Ann Duffy
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.
Rory Kinnear
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Archibald MacLeish
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon
Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing it.
Roger McGough
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.
Lafcadio Hearn
Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.
James Branch Cabell
My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.
Guy Johnson
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Robert Morgan
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.
Randall Jarrell
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.
James Laughlin
I’m pretty much all for poetry in public places – poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
Billy Collins
I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
Margaret Atwood
Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.
Rupi Kaur
I like to write poetry.
Rebecca Ferguson
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
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.
Adrian Dunbar
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.
Robert Morgan
All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.
Joseph Brodsky
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.
Joseph Roux
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.
Amanda Gorman
Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one’s geographic landscape, sometimes out of one’s cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.
Diane Wakoski
I look for poetry in English because it’s the only language I read.
Jack Prelutsky
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope
No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
John Barton
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.
Faith Ringgold
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Seamus Heaney
I certainly can’t speak for all cultures or all societies, but it’s clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It’s not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
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.
George Oppen
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
Natasha Trethewey
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Alfred de Vigny
Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
Robert Adamson
Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
Andres Segovia
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
James Broughton
Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Stephen Sondheim
The creative act amazes me. Whether it’s poetry, whether it’s music, it’s an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.
Joy Harjo
And if they haven’t got poetry in them, there’s nothing you can do that will produce it.
Norman MacCaig
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz
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.
Laura Riding
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.
Peter Porter
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism – how should poetry escape?
John Crowe Ransom
In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.
Paul Heyse
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
Steven Pinker
Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.
Michael Eric Dyson
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.
Robert Morgan
We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order – poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
John Drinkwater
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.
Eugenio Montale
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
Robert Morgan
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.
John Keats
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
Diane Wakoski
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
A. E. Housman
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.
Ric Ocasek
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
I think that’s what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Walter Pater
Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.
Bernie Taupin
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.
John F. Kerry
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I’m glad that I did it.
Tom Glazer
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Herbert Spencer
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.
Thurston Moore
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.
Eugenio Montale
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.
Paul Rand
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
George Murray
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.
Archibald MacLeish
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.
Tracy K. Smith
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot
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.
Seamus Heaney
Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
Joshua Logan
When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
John Millington Synge
I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
Keith Haring
The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Trevor Paglen
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.
William Cullen Bryant
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.
John Ashbery
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
Raoul Vaneigem
Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
John Dryden
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.
Denis Diderot
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
Norman MacCaig
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.
Robert Morgan
I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.
Kapil Sibal
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.
James Fenton
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
John Drinkwater
There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.
Dave Grohl
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
Paul Celan
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
Jeffery Deaver
I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
Robert Morgan
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus Heaney
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
Robert Morgan
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
Mahmoud Darwish
Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.
Rick Fox
And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
Lynn Johnston
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.
Anne Stevenson
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.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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.
Peter Davison
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
Henry R. Luce
I always thought millennials are going westward, and they probably won’t understand vernacular poetry.
Ayushmann Khurrana
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can’t imagine ourselves living without.
A. R. Ammons
I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
Marguerite Young
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
A. R. Ammons
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Walter Pater
I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Maya Angelou
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It’s a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.
Amanda Gorman
Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
Lafcadio Hearn
That’s all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction – I don’t think anyone could know how much it really means.
Chuck Berry
Why should poetry have to make sense?
Charlie Chaplin
Poetry allies itself with beauty – a supreme union – but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.
Saint-John Perse
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
Erik Satie
Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.
Asghar Farhadi
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Mitchell
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
Horace Walpole
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
A. E. Housman
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.
Walter Pater
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.
Rita Dove
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.
Jason Newsted
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.
Mike Leigh
I think there’s no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
James Laughlin
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.
Allen Tate
All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
Lord Alfred Douglas
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
Carol Ann Duffy
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.
Wislawa Szymborska
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
Brooks Atkinson
What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic – this is by no means the same thing.
Fernand Leger
God is the perfect poet.
Robert Browning
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.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
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.
Robert Adamson
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset
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.
Jess Walter
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
David Hare
I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you’d expect, huh?
Suzi Quatro
One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.
Marilynne Robinson
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Walter Mosley
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
John Muir
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
Edward Hirsch
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
Granted, I’m someone who loves words. I’ve always loved poetry – so it’s suited to me.
Aimee Bender
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.
Shelby Foote
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.
Mark Van Doren
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
Danielle Steel
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.
David Whyte
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Mark Strand
No poetry that I’m aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
Felix Dennis
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
Albert Einstein
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Horace
Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.
Amanda Gorman
I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
Naguib Mahfouz
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.
Robert Morgan
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.
Robert Hass
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Gunter Grass
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.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
Gertrude Stein
With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Peter Abrahams
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent Van Gogh
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.
Aaron Neville
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Paul Engle
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.
Derek Walcott
Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
Amy Clampitt
But I don’t think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
Diane Wakoski
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.
Viggo Mortensen
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.
Yusef Komunyakaa
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.
Seamus Heaney
I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
Robert Morgan
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
Vikram Seth
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
John Barton
I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
Anthony Hopkins
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.
Herschel Walker
I realized poetry’s the thing that I can do ’cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
Philip Levine
Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
Wislawa Szymborska
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.
David Hunt
