Poetry Quotes

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers. For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.