Quotes on poetry

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.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

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.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

Author: Robert Adamson

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.

Author: Robert Adamson

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.

Author: Robert Adamson

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Author: Vicente Aleixandre

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

Author: A. Ammons

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

Author: A. Ammons

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.

Author: A. Ammons

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

Author: A. Ammons

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Author: A. Ammons

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

Author: David Antin

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

Author: David Antin

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Author: Matthew Arnold

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

Author: Antonin Artaud

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.

Author: John Ashbery

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Author: John Ashbery

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

Author: Rene Auberjonois

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

Author: W. Auden

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.

Author: Paul Auster

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Author: Gaston Bachelard

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Author: Russell Baker

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.

Author: Russell Baker

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.

Author: Russell Baker

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

Author: John Barton

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.

Author: John Barton

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

Author: John Barton

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

Author: John Barton

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

Author: Mario Batali

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

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.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Author: Maxwell Bodenheim

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.

Author: Niels Bohr

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.

Author: Lisa Bonet

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Author: Georges Braque

The cliche is dead poetry.

Author: Gerald Brenan

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Author: Joseph Brodsky

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Author: James Broughton

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.

Author: James Broughton

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Author: James Broughton

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

Author: James Broughton

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

Author: James Broughton

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

Author: James Broughton

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Author: Anatole Broyard

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

Author: William Bryant

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.

Author: Basil Bunting

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

Author: Lord Byron

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

Author: James Cabell

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

Author: John Cage

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

Author: John Cage

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

Author: Simon Callow

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

Author: Paul Celan

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.

Author: Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

Author: Edwin Chapin

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Author: Charlie Chaplin

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Author: Gilbert Chesterton

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

Author: John Ciardi

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

Author: Amy Clampitt

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.

Author: Lucille Clifton

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Author: Lucille Clifton

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

Author: Jean Cocteau

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

Author: Stephen Colbert

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.

Author: Samuel Coleridge

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Author: Samuel Coleridge

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

Author: Judy Collins

He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.

Author: John Colville

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.

Author: Hart Crane

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

Author: Robert Creeley

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Author: Mario Cuomo

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.

Author: George Curtis

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

Author: Peter Davison

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

Author: Peter Davison

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.

Author: Peter Davison

Poetry is composing for the breath.

Author: Peter Davison

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Author: Peter Davison

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Author: Peter Davison

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

Author: Peter Davison

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

Author: Peter Davison

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

Author: Peter Davison

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.

Author: Peter Davison

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

Author: Peter Davison

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

Author: Peter Davison

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.

Author: Jeffery Deaver

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

Author: Jeffery Deaver

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Author: Jeffery Deaver

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Author: John Denham

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

Author: James Dickey

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.

Author: James Dickey

The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.

Author: Bruce Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Author: Emily Dickinson

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Author: Emily Dickinson

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Author: Emily Dickinson

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Author: Denis Diderot

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

Author: Paul Dirac

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

Author: John Donne

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

Author: Alfred Douglas

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

Author: Rita Dove

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Author: Rita Dove

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

Author: Rita Dove

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.

Author: Rita Dove

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.

Author: Rita Dove

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

Author: Rita Dove

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

Author: Edward Dowden

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.

Author: John Drinkwater

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

Author: John Drinkwater

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.

Author: John Drinkwater

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

Author: John Drinkwater

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Author: John Drinkwater

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

Author: John Drinkwater

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.

Author: John Drinkwater

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.

Author: John Drinkwater

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

Author: John Drinkwater

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

Author: John Dryden

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

Author: Carol Duffy

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

Author: Helen Dunmore

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.

Author: Richard Eberhart

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Author: Albert Einstein

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.

Author: T. Eliot

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.

Author: T. Eliot

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Author: T. Eliot

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Author: T. Eliot

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Author: Henry Ellis

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.

Author: Paul Engle

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Author: George Farquhar

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

Author: Ian Finlay

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

Author: Ian Finlay

But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.

Author: Ian Finlay

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Author: Ian Finlay

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Author: F. Fitzgerald

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Author: Robert Fitzgerald

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Author: Gustave Flaubert

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Author: Gustave Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Author: Gustave Flaubert

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

Author: Shelby Foote

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

Author: Shelby Foote

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

Author: E. Forster

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

Author: Rick Fox

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Author: Robert Frost

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Author: Robert Frost

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Author: Robert Frost

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.

Author: Christopher Fry

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

Author: Hamlin Garland

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Author: Jose Gasset

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.

Author: Gordon Getty

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Author: Khalil Gibran

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

Author: Allen Ginsberg