Poetry Quotes

Love is the poetry of the senses.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.