On Poetry Quotes

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

A poet cannot be a Party member ... without paying the price.

In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one's friends--give me the country.

I read a lot of prose poetry and get inspired by more-so just a state of mind.

Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

A poem round and perfect as a star.

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.

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

I love being part of poetry conversations. I love talking about what I've read.

Poetry is one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It's all about discovery.

I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.

The trouble with poetry is it's often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry

For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.

Out of the attempt to harmonize our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry, - or, it may be, religion.

I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all.

Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

Poetry is probably the last gift economy. Part of the negotiation is to understand that you're going to do something you really want to do, so you're going to take whatever life comes with that.

I believe in solitude broken like bread by poetry.

Poetry colors beings, objects, landscapes and sensations with a kind of new and particular light, which is in fact that of the poet's emotions.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

I've always felt alone and isolated, and living on the West Coast, there's no poetry community out here, and if there is, it's really spread out - because it's LA, it's spread out.

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

Maybe poetry's not so important, but ... it makes life worth living.

If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.

What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others: it engages the personality.