What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
~By Stephen Greenblatt ~
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
~By Jose Ortega Y Gasset ~
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
~By John Andrew Holmes ~
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
~By Vincent Van Gogh ~
PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
~By Federico Fellini ~
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
~By John Keats ~
Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
~By William C. Bryant ~
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
~By Isaac Rosenberg ~
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
~By Gordon Getty ~
Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
~By William Collins ~
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
~By Jerry B. Jenkins ~
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
~By Mark Strand ~
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
~By Tobias Wolff ~
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
~By Wallace Stevens ~
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
~By George Will ~
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
~By Muhammad Iqbal ~
Prose talks and poetry sings.
~By Franz Grillparzer ~
If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.
~By A. E. Housman ~
Why should poetry have to make sense?
~By Charlie Chaplin ~
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
~By Peter Davison ~
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
~By Comte de Lautreamont ~
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
Wine is bottled poetry.
~By Robert Louis Stevenson ~
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
~By Robert Morgan ~
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
~By John Cage ~
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.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
~By Audre Lorde ~
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.
~By Jeffery Deaver ~
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
~By Hu Shih ~
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
~By Vanessa Redgrave ~
I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.
~By Bruce Cockburn ~
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.
~By Malcolm Wilson ~
We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.
~By James Laughlin ~
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
~By John Barton ~
The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
~By Walter Mosley ~
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
~By John Ruskin ~
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
~By John Barton ~
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
~By Laura Riding ~
But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.
~By Anna Jameson ~
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
~By James Branch Cabell ~
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
~By Paul Engle ~
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
~By John Millington Synge ~
Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
~By F. L. Lucas ~
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
~By Dennis Gabor ~
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.
~By Peter Davison ~
One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
~By Nathalie Sarraute ~
It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
~By Jason Newsted ~
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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.
~By George Murray ~
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
~By Thomas Hardy ~
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
~By Henry Ellis ~
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
~By Gyorgy Ligeti ~
When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
~By Jose Marti ~
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
~By Don Marquis ~
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.
~By James Laughlin ~
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
~By Paul Dirac ~
Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.
~By Bette Midler ~
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
~By Rita Dove ~
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.
~By Lynn Johnston ~
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
~By Peter Davison ~
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
~By Paul Auster ~
I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
~By Knut Hamsun ~
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.
~By Basil Bunting ~
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
~By Thomas Mann ~
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
~By Robert Morgan ~
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
~By Robert Morgan ~
The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
~By James Gates Percival ~
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
~By Charles Simic ~
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
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.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
~By Robert Penn Warren ~
That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
~By Ishmael Reed ~
My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
~By Peter Davison ~
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.
~By Robert Morgan ~
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
~By Danielle Steel ~
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
~By Walter Savage Landor ~
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
~By David Antin ~
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
~By George Murray ~
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
~By Juan Ramon Jimenez ~
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
~By George Oppen ~
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
~By Carol Ann Duffy ~
I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.
~By Charles Olson ~
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.
~By Walter Pater ~
Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
~By Robert Frost ~
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