Poetry Quotes

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

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

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

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

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

I love romantic poetry.

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

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.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.