On Poetry Quotes

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

I'm sort of annoyed that some very basic things about poetic forms were not conveyed to me in the various poetry courses I took over the years.

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.

Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression.

My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.

Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire.

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

Poetry is the work of the bard and of the people who inspire him.

Terrible times in which priests no longer merit the praise of poets and in which poets have not yet begun to be priests.

...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

You arrive at truth through poetry; I arrive at poetry through truth.

The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.

I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

Every word was once a poem.

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Nothing is made, nothing disappears. The same changes, at the same places, never stopping.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Down on my knees / I peel back the layers of the world.

I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

Poetry is the Devil's wine.

Will the day tell its secret Before it disappears, Becomes timeless night.

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

Poetry = Anger x Imagination

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.

Twas the night before Thanksgiving. All the food's in the oven. And I'm in the bedroom performin' self lovin'.

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory.

Im looking for a girl who's fun to be around.

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Blood was its Avatar and its seal.

The world is always open, Waiting to be discovered.

We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us up with its strangeness.