Poetry Quotes

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

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

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

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.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'

The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

It's not easy to define poetry.

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

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.