Poetry Quotations

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

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.

When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

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.

I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.

After attending the gymnasium between my eighth and seventeenth years, I studied classical philology at Berlin University for two years under Boeckh and Lachmann, and with the friendly support of Emanuel Geibel and Franz Kugler, I dabbled in all sorts of poetry.

If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'

To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.

Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.

My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous

If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

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

I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!

Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

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.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

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.

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.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.

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

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

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.

Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.

Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

I've been surprised to learn how many people love poetry. It's beautiful to see that people want poetry in their lives.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

I play guitar; you'll find me at home strumming 'Vincent' on the guitar. I also read a lot of poetry, and Shakespeare was my first love, which was why I got into acting. A lot of the fighters are intelligent!

The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

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

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

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.

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

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.

It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.

Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.

I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.

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

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

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

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.

My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.

I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

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.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

I do actually dabble in a bit of poetry! And I'm yet to pen a script, but it is something that I've been telling myself I want to do.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people's space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it's literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song.

I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

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.

I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

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

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

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

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.

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.

When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.

Whatever brief delights it provides, mere strangeness in poetry and prose eventually leaves us cold, especially when we suspect the writer is stretching for effect to avoid the actual life before his eyes.

Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I've heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who's good and who's not. It's like the word 'lyrical' - 'lyrical' is the worst word in the entire world.

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.