Poetry Quotes
- Page 25One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
Stephen Sondheim
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
Eugenio Montale
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
Anatole Broyard
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.
Helen Thomas
I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.
P. J. Harvey
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
Lascelles Abercrombie
I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
Diane Wakoski
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
Paul Dirac
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Eugenio Montale
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
John Drinkwater
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo
I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
Jeffery Deaver
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
Walter Pater
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
George Oppen
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Robert Morgan
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
Diane Wakoski
But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf