Poetry Quotes

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.