On Poetry Quotes

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

Mathematics may, like poetry or music, "promote and sustain a lofty habit of mind."

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!

I teach Zen, tantric mysticism, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, Tibetan mysticism, occultism and psychic development. I also teach poetry and literature, film and many other different things.

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It's a land of higher ideals.

In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it.

I read a lot of poetry. I read some history.

I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.

I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years.

I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.

Our poetry emulates the recent progress in military strategy: Our army's strength is the foot soldiers.

I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts.

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

[The story of Adam and Eve] it's poetry. One must interpret it as poetry. The first 11 chapters of Genesis [the Primeval History] are absolutely remarkable.

Slogan-making is not poetry.

And at some point I would like to talk my publisher into doing an anthology of my poetry alongside some teen readers poetry. It would be fun, and really wonderful to get their stuff out there.

The truly astounding thing is the Baathist regime supports poetry like nobody else, probably in the world.

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.

I love poetry, but I find it so difficult to write well.

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

True poetry, like the religious prompting itself, springs from the emotional side of a man's complex nature, and is ever in harmony with his highest intuitions and aspirations.

Poetry is fired by love.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Wine is bottled poetry, he thinks.

I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems.

To make a film you have to dream a film... that's true of poetry as well.

If it were not for poetry, few men would ever fall in love.

For me, poetry is a form of activism. And that word enables the labelers, and also gives them a rash.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

We can write the new chapters in a visual language whose prose and poetry will need no translation.

I actually remember celebrating National Poetry Day at school; I remember having to write and read a load.

In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming.

We're in a crisis. We're in a crisis like I don't think America has ever known in my lifetime. But we have to keep joy in our lives, love in our lives, poetry in our lives, dancing in our lives.