Poetry Quotes

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.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.

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.