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.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

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

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

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.