Poetry Quotes

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

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.

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.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.