On Poetry Quotes

Protest poetry -- could there be consensus poetry?

Made poetry a mere mechanic art.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

...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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Fog and hypocrisy - that is to say, shadow, convention, decency - these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

There's information about everything from poetry to pills, from picture frames to pyramids, and from pudding to psychology--and that's just in the P aisle, which we're walking down right now.

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.

When you speak a new language you must see if you can translate all of the poetry of your old language into the new one.

You should check out William Shatner's album The Transformed Man. It will alter the way you hear poetry forever. And not in a good way.

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

There’s no preparation for poetry.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

I really came to literature through poetry.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.

I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.

I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.

There will be miracles After the last war is won Science and poetry rule in the new world to come Prophets and angels Gave us the power to see What an amazing future there will be

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

Demanding historical (or scientific) veracity as a prerequisite for truth is another kind of tunnel vision. To do so is to mistake poetry for prose.

Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.