On Poetry Quotes

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

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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

Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.

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.

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

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

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.

History after all is the true poetry.

History is the new poetry.

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.

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'.

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

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?

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

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!

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

More people write poetry than read it.

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.

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

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection.

Poetry has a small audience, but a large influence.

I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

It's poetry in motion, when she turned her tender eyes to me.

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.

Sometimes you get lit students that know a lot about the canon but virtually nothing about contemporary poetry and vice versa. I like to mix things up.

In order for poetry to exist there has to be not-poetry to contrast it with.