Poetry Quotes

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

Wine is bottled poetry.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

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

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.