Poetry Quotes

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

I write poetry in order to live more fully.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.