On Poetry Quotes

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

I really came to literature through poetry.

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

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.

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

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

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

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

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

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

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

Still may syllables jar with time, Still may reason war with rhyme, Resting never!

It is poetry that changes everything.

Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.

Poetry is very crafted. You can't have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

Who, except the poets, reads poetry?

There is no end to grief. Nor no end to poetry.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

I'm interested in the poetry of reality.

I wanted to be a writer for a while. I was an excellent child writer. I won multiple poetry contests. I was published at age three - I think that was more about novelty than my immense talent.

Science sees signs; Poetry, the thing signified. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.

Poetry should be vital--either stirring our blood by its divine movements or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both is supreme glory, to do either is enduring fame.

Poetry is the purest form of insanity.

People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.

We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

As I published books, I realized, that's not really what I want. I don't care about the books as much anymore. I just want to write poetry.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.

Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well.

There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I didnt write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

And a lot of times in slam poetry I feel like people are so worried about the performance that the words might not be as strong.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

Virginity is the poetry, not the reality, of life.

I always wanted to write poetry, even when I was very young.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

The poetry when I was a kid felt like something that I could control, and whether it failed or not, whether it was good or not, was totally on me and I could accept that. It was entirely mine.