Poetry Quotes

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

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.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.