Poetry Quotes

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.

To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.