Poetry Quotes

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.

Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

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.