On Poetry Quotes

The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

More people write poetry than read it.

Lenny Bruce genius was the unique ability to investigate hypocrisy and expose social inequities in a street rap that was really a form of poetry.

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.

Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates a nation.

To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.

How wide is all this long pretense! There is in love a sweetness ready penned, Copy out only that, and save expense.

As flames do work and wind when they ascend, So did I weave myself into the sense.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

What is more beautiful than a sea of water with a number of white-winged boats skirting its surface? Poetry and beauty contesting with the wind and the waves!

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

Functions of technical information, historic record, analytic argument, which are integral and obvious to Dante's use of verse are now almost completely a part of the 'prosaic'.

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

History is the new poetry.

History after all is the true poetry.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

Teaching poetry, teaching as such, is worthy - if back breaking.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.

When I said. A rose is a rose is a rose. And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.

Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.

Most Americans do not like poetry. We may respect it, but we do not enjoy it.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.

What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'

Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.

I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

My father was an innovator. He's the first person who sang and set Rumi's poetry into music 35 years, 40 years ago.

You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.

I wrote a lot of poetry in the last two years of high school, all about the same girl I was in love with. That was pretty awful. Did you know that in poetry, every line does not need to rhyme?

poetry ... shows with a sudden intense clarity what is already there.

Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

I am inclined to believe that some music, like certain poetry, finds its appeal and way to all.

I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics

If Rumi is the most-read poet in America today, Coleman Barks is in good part responsible. His ear for the truly divine madness in Rumi’s poetry is really remarkable.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

And take back ill-polished stanzas to the anvil.

That, lad," he said proudly, "was some of the worst poetry I have heard for a long time. It was offensive to the ear and a torrrture to the soul....We'll make a gonnagle out of ye yet!