On Poetry Quotes

The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi's poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal.

Happy World Poetry Day: 'The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them.

Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

Painting can be like poetry but as somebody who creates both I feel the necessity for both so they cant be that similar. Sometimes I think it's as basic as not wanting to get dirty.

Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.

...we're all in a soup of trying to live by words, and trying to live by poetry. It's both humbling, and really flattering to know that my words are part of all that.

I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.

Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.

I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there’s no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.

For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more.

O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.

Made poetry a mere mechanic art.

Protest poetry -- could there be consensus poetry?

I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.

Poetry, like sanctity, is the orchestration of multiple attributes into vast, compelling wholes.

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry [...] It's like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.

Take the sweet poetry of life away, and what remains behind?

For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

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.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

Poetry has never brought me in enough money to buy shoestrings.

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

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.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

Poetry in love is no more to be avoided than jealousy.

Poetry can be the bridge, the crossover point in the mind between the physical and the spiritual. A place where the two can meet.

It is true that I didn't write any poetry between 1995 and 2011. The reason for this was probably because I had stayed away from fiction for so long and couldn't tear myself away from it.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.

The poet's first job of work is to put bread on the table.

I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.

Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.