Poetry Quotes

The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.

Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

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.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

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.