Poetry Quotes

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

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

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

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.

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

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. 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.

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

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

Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

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

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.