On Poetry Quotes

Poetry is the Devil's wine.

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

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?

Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

We don't get groupies.We get teenagers who want to read us their poetry.

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.

The ethos and critique are of poetry, which becomes a rich dark with a phosphorescence of lyric as witness.

Chess has this in common with making poetry; that the desire for it comes upon the amateur in gusts.

History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.

Thats a wonderful change thats 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.

Solitude never hurt anyone. Emily Dickinson lived alone, and she wrote some of the most beautiful poetry the world has ever known... then went crazy as a loon." Lisa Simpson

Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.

Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.

Poets are born, not paid.

I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That's my only concern. Everything else seems wrong.

I've been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I've been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

Poetry can cause irreparable harm when misapplied

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

The poem began with the title. Then I was annoyed by one of the occasional poetry-is-dead articles. Then I refute that notion.

Winter's notion of poetry is tragedy. It knows nothing of comedy. Its laughter was frozen on its lips long ago.

Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.

Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.

Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.

Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.

I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood.

Frances Bellamy thought the changes spoiled the poetry of it. He was a pretty stern guy. Everybody has some sense of humor, but I don't think he had much.

Reciting poetry isn't acting, it's memory work. Actor's are deceivers. People who pretend to be something else for a living aren't right in the head.

Poetry ... ... a place for the genuine, Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

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.

Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.

The three ingredients of poetry: the mystery of the universe, spiritual curiosity, the energy of language.

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

one reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.

We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

Poetry resonates differently in each culture; it doesn't in America.

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.

Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.

Give shape, artist! don't talk! Your poem be but a breath.