Poetry Quotes
- Page 2Alchemy 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.
Robert Morgan
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.
Diane Wakoski
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
Gilbert Murray
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.
Eugenio Montale
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.
Story Musgrave
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
A. E. Housman
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.
Shelby Foote
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.
Socrates
So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.
Tracy K. Smith
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
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.
Thomas Lynch
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
Andres Segovia
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.
T. S. Eliot
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
John Millington Synge
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
Norman MacCaig
I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.
Kenneth Koch
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert