We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Poetry Quotes from Maya Angelou, Eugenio Montale, Philip Schultz, Elia Kazan, Rita Dove. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you’ve ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you’re already on the way to poetry. It’s about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
A poem can have an impact, but you can’t expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
I didn’t love Jim Morrison ’cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.
Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.
I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
Let’s say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can’t do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
Making poetry with a camera – that’s the essence of what I do.
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can’t drop that. It’s reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.
America’s liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.
I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
I’ve done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I’ve compiled a book of poetry that’s completed, and two others I’m working on.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people’s heads as they listen in the car. You don’t have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it’s just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
I’m not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word’s meaning, or multiple meanings.
Marriage – a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
What a great poem teaches you – and it’s not intellectual at all – is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.
Otherwise I don’t read much adult poetry at all, because I’m not smart enough and mostly I don’t get it.
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don’t by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It’s delightful to distort size, to see something that’s tiny as though it were vast.
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
You don’t have to live in a garage to write great poetry.
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet’s life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
I don’t think Auden liked my poetry very much, he’s very Anglican.
I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.
When you’re looking that far out, you’re giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn’t need translation. It’s like poetry, it touches you.
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have ‘trained’ or ‘practised’ enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Poetry is the deification of reality.
I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.
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 would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he’s going to write poetry or songs.
This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.
But I don’t think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
They need to learn poetry. They don’t need to learn about poetry. They don’t need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don’t need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations… With basketball, you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You’ll have that readership. Keep going until you know you’re doing work that’s worthy. And then see what happens. That’s my advice.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
‘Hamilton’ is, of course, closely tied to the Obamas because Lin first performed the opening number at a White House poetry jam.
All the modern verse plays, they’re terrible; they’re mostly about the poetry. It’s more important that the play is first.
I’m no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it’s got everything: it’s a book of poetry, it’s a book of principle, it’s a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
Poetry can’t give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.
You have to be careful about over-politicizing the utterances of people of colour because, oftentimes, there’s poetry that seeks to go beyond that narrative.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it’s not simply telling a story.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn’t suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it’s just obtuse to them. It’s hard to relate to.
Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.
Definitely, some of the artistry and poetry has been lost in modern chess. It’s very rare that I play a game where I’m like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting. There were so many possibilities! It was such a rich game.’
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
When you’re 15, you’re not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting – not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch’s brew.
Prose talks and poetry sings.
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
Around 10 years old I started being into church and being around the church. I started doing poetry – I was doing all clean poetry, totally clean.
All those authors there, most of whom of course I’ve never met. That’s the poetry side, that’s the prose side, that’s the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you’ve enjoyed.
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
It all has to do with art – writing, painting, things I’ve done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry – things that are designed for songs, but they’re always poems first.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself – as a vocation and an elevation almost.
There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It’s been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
I don’t think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can’t teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Superstition is the poetry of life.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn’t not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being’s vital essence – a not wholly irrational belief.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it’s now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
In school I was sidelined by Tamil language teachers. But in the film industry, I got interested in Tamil poetry after reading and working with the Vairamuthu.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
Poetry is the deification of reality.
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
That’s one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one’s little turn – that you’re just part of the great crop, as it were.
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.
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.
My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I’ve experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
The moment of change is the only poem.
One: whose shoulders do you stand on? And two: what do you stand for? These are two questions that I always begin my poetry workshops with students because at times, poetry can seem like this dead art form for old white men who just seem like they were born to be old, like, you know, Benjamin Button or something.
I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry – and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn’t mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.
Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
One can’t write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don’t like poetry.
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
It would probably surprise people to know that I’m interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
There are Behan experts in international universities, but we seem to have forgotten him here in Ireland. He was an extraordinarily gifted writer. His poetry alone is outstanding.
Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother’s Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don’t care; that’s what poetry is supposed to do.
Poetry always runs away from you – it’s very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can’t define it.
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.
I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
Poetry allies itself with beauty – a supreme union – but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn’t seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says ‘The Road Not Taken,’ which is a poem by Robert Frost.
Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
The oration of poetry, I consider to be its own art form and tradition.
Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
One of poetry’s great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image – things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why – is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.
I’ve often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it’s been doing to my poetry when I’m not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Often people, when they’re confronted with a poem, it’s like someone who keep saying ‘what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?’ And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.
I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there.
One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
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.
In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can’t be used for manipulation; it’s why you never see good poetry in advertising.
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories – these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I’ve been doing for years before that.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I’d be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.
And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I’ll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
We have a motto at Naropa: ‘Keep the world safe for poetry.’ It’s humorous but has some real bite to it. If the world is safe for poetry, it can be safe for many other things.
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one’s done it this way.
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
God is the perfect poet.
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
On the other hand, if there’s an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I’ve lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
There’s a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that’s a bit blurred in my mind.
He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.
Ted Hughes is dead. That’s a fact, OK. Then there’s something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed – because that can’t be proven.
The claims I’m making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We’re much more relaxed around those art forms. We’re willing to ask, ‘How could this find a place in my heart?’
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.
When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.
What I wanted to do in rock ‘n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
Some people ask, ‘How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?’ I say, ‘My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.’
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
We’re all just animals. That’s all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That’s where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.
Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it’s like a jackhammer.
The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I’m very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.
Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
It’s always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson’s poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
What excites me is that I’m an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life. I think that’s good news.
I’m not a rock star writing poetry. I don’t feel like a rock star and I don’t know what one is, actually. I’m a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn’t play, it has a poignancy to it.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
I’m about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don’t know if anybody wants to read it. It’s on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, ‘Okay, that’s another one.’ They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry – to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
I never think about poetry except when I’m writing it. I mean my poetry.
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.
However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.
There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
Poetry is life distilled.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
I like the beauty of Faulkner’s poetry. But I don’t like his themes, not at all.
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, just a of questions that I don’t hear other artists asking.
I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important.
Every single soul is a poem.
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I’m tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they’re embarrassed that I write it or they’re embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
There’s poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don’t like doing what people expect me to do.
The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
One: whose shoulders do you stand on? And two: what do you stand for? These are two questions that I always begin my poetry workshops with students because at times, poetry can seem like this dead art form for old white men who just seem like they were born to be old, like, you know, Benjamin Button or something.
Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.
What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.
I’m a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn’t matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They’re the same if you reach the beauty.
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.
Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn’t poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
I’ve already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn’t appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.
‘Sunshine Superman’ was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.
I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.
Money is a kind of poetry.
Children seem naturally drawn to poetry – it’s some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry – a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language – and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
I didn’t want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it’s timeless, that it reaches back.
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
That’s a wonderful change that’s taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Always be a poet, even in prose.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
‘Blue Velvet’ changed my life forever. It was like I’d always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn’t been reached before.
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
Well – I started writing – probably in the early 60s and by say ’65-’66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published – certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he’s written poetry then let the verdict be that he’s a poet.
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
I’ve always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they’re saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
Personality is everything in art and poetry.
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it’s harder to write. It’s harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you’re a professor, and one frankly doesn’t get a lot of girls as a poet.
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they’re the things that sustain us. And they’re the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It’s coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
Poetry is composing for the breath.
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
I don’t think it’s always good to read lots of poetry.
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
I didn’t know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student – and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin – suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.
I don’t think of poetry as a ‘rational’ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can’t really think of anyone who’s done anything like it since.
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
I guess the thing that I’m most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It’s the source of my creativity.
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can’t dismiss Josey Wales’ quite liberal worldview.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
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.
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Songs are all poetry, and they don’t make any sense.
Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person’s earth lives.
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn’t. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
I don’t think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, ‘What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?’ That’s the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they’re more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven’t the least idea of where poetry is going.
Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
Lucknow, as far as I have heard, is always known for its culture, literature and poetry. So it has set a cultural benchmark for the entire country.
With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It’s difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Why should poetry have to make sense?
A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We’ve tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.
I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don’t affect your work.
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
If a poem is not memorable, there’s probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
I write all the time – I write poetry, I love to write.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I’ve always read poetry; I’ve always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn’t think so.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
I don’t think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn’t. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
I read poetry to save time.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
A lot of people think, ‘I’ll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn’t work out I’ll go get a law degree, do something else that’s more practical.’ For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.
Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found – indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
If we ask a vague question, such as, ‘What is poetry?’ we expect a vague answer, such as, ‘Poetry is the music of words,’ or ‘Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.’
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn’t agree with Bly that it’s a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.
I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T’ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.
I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
It’s always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It’s hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there – not because you’ve done a comedy performance but because you’re talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it’s Whitman, who lost his job for ‘Leaves of Grass,’ or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose ‘Howl’ was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you’re going to put yourself in jeopardy.
I’m hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career – they are so fun and witty.
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I’ve ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don’t say I can write everything well.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I’m glad that I did it.
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I’d like to publish it someday.
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
I think there’s no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
But for me, being an editor I’ve been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
We don’t attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.
Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
I really disliked Philadelphia society – really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
I think it’s often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don’t mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.
Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.
One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry – the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it’s no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it’s really just about the money, the perceived prestige.
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
I didn’t know until later, but my uncle was quite a famous bohemian in Glasgow, and he played guitar. My father was a kind of a poetic bohemian, and he read me poetry.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker’s background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.
Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don’t want our lives to end.
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
I look for poetry in English because it’s the only language I read.
If you don’t mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there’s no poetry in that.
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.
I think that’s what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.
Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare – and precious as a pearl.
I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
There is a great deal of freshness and charm in ‘400 Blows.’ There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut’s camera looks at his beloved city.
I have experienced healing through other writers’ poetry, but there’s no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I’ll write a bad poem.
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
I’m quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.
You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I’ve decided to create stories through video games.
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Wine is bottled poetry.
That is what I did with Jack, and that’s why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
And if they haven’t got poetry in them, there’s nothing you can do that will produce it.
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah’s ‘Black Reign’ is the album that stands out the most.
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don’t do things like that anymore – tracking words down to their roots.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
There is probably nothing wrong with art for art’s sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism – how should poetry escape?
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
It’s not easy to define poetry.
I don’t look on poetry as closed works. I feel they’re going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.
No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
