Poetry Quotes

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

The crown of literature is poetry.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.