Poetry Quotations | Page 4

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

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.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

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!

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.

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

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

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

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

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

'NewsHour' is very interested in poetry, but they're also interested in not just that something's cute to add on at the end of their programming, but something that actually is integrated into the news.

I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.

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.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.

I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

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.

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.

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.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.

We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.

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

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

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.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

The performance is part of a larger picture. Getting up and performing poetry in front of big crowds is another way for these kids to view their lives from a different perspective, and we want the kids in our program 20 years from now to be reading the books some of these kids have written.

The poetry was the man, the man was the poetry.

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.

We're extremely excited to have Lisa on board. Her communications and arts promotion background, as well as her exposure to the national and local poetry communities, will prove hugely beneficial to us.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.