Poetry Quotes

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.

Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.

I'm not a great poetry fan.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

To me, Doors fans were always the 16-year-old idiots at parties, getting stoned, and talking about how Morrison's lyrics were like poetry... like that was a deep thought.

Poetry is life distilled.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

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.