Poetry Quotes

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

I like poems that are little games.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.