On Poetry Quotes

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.

Poverty, Poetry, and new Titles of Honor, make Men ridiculous

Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.

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.

There’s no preparation for poetry.

... the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

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.

With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse

During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.