On Poetry Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.

Poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths.

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections.

Prose pretends to be straightforward in its application to the truth, but truth itself is a dissembler. Poetry, much more honest, knows the deception can't be overcome.

The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Poetry is that which is lost in translation.

I call my style, "Poetry in Motion." So I'm working on a new art to make fighting even more beautiful.

Poetry is my first love. Photography often fails to look into things. It looks at things. Poetry is so much more truthful.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

The five excellences include: calligraphy, painting, poetry, medicine, and t'ai chi chuan.

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

Every time I read Erin Belieu work I'm pierced in that wonderful way poetry can.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

Satire is a kind of poetry in which human vices are reprehended.

Early poems are a thing it takes years to live down.

Poetry is the only hopeEven if you do not believe it, you have to do it.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.

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.

I have to reach "the poetry condition" to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.

What I try to do is to keep emotion on a tight leash; otherwise, it can never be transubstantiated into poetry.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.

Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.

Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

For poetry, more than any other art, except music, has a compelling hold upon the spiritual side of life.

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

When Poetry thus keeps its place as the handmaiden of piety, it shall attain not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away.

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

My wife has been my greatest earthly inspiration. She excels in eloquence, the poetry of words, empathy and graciousness.

But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read!