Poetry Quotes

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

The moment of change is the only poem.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.

Poetry does not consist of words alone; there must be sentiment and fancy, combination and arrangement.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.