Poetry Quotes

Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.

I'm not a great poetry fan.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

To me, Doors fans were always the 16-year-old idiots at parties, getting stoned, and talking about how Morrison's lyrics were like poetry... like that was a deep thought.

Poetry is life distilled.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.