Poetry Quotes

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

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

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

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

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

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

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.

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 love romantic poetry.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

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.

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

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

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

It's not easy to define poetry.

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.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.

I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

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.

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

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.

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

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.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

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.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

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.

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

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.

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

I like to write poetry.

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

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

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

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

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

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

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

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

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

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