Poetry Quotes

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

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.

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

I love romantic poetry.