Poetry Quotes

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.

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

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

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.