Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
~By Ian Hamilton Finlay ~
Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
~By John Drinkwater ~
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
~By Jean Cocteau ~
Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.
~By Joseph Roux ~
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
~By Boris Pasternak ~
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
~By Antonin Artaud ~
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
~By Philip Levine ~
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
~By Huston Smith ~
A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.
~By Lisa Bonet ~
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
~By Alfred de Vigny ~
The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
~By Raoul Vaneigem ~
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
~By Henry Ellis ~
I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
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.
~By Thom Gunn ~
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
~By Denis Diderot ~
It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?
~By Robin Wright Penn ~
Poetry transforms and redeems the common, the hurtful, the humiliating.
~By Susan Montez ~
Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
~By Paul Valery ~
For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
~By John Ashbery ~
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
~By Salvatore Quasimodo ~
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
~By Juan Ramon Jimenez ~
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
~By Jerry B. Jenkins ~
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
~By George Murray ~
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
~By Robert Graves ~
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
~By Franz Grillparzer ~
Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.
~By Georges Seurat ~
I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
~By Jeffery Deaver ~
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
~By Thomas Lynch ~
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
~By Naomi Klein ~
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.
~By Rita Dove ~
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
~By William Wordsworth ~
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
~By Gustave Flaubert ~
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
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.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
~By Gustave Flaubert ~
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
~By Julio Cortazar ~
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
~By Julie Taymor ~
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
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 ~
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold.
~By Diane Glancy ~
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
~By Novalis ~
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
~By Edgar Allan Poe ~
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
~By Victor Hugo ~
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
~By Robert Frost ~
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
~By Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
~By John Donne ~
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
~By Charles Simic ~
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
~By Raymond Chandler ~
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
~By June Jordan ~
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
~By Richard M. Nixon ~
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.
~By Will Cuppy ~
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
~By Sylvia Plath ~
Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
~By Andres Segovia ~
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
~By Isaac Rosenberg ~
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.
~By Jewel Kilcher ~
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
~By Muriel Rukeyser ~
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
~By George Will ~
Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
~By Muriel Rukeyser ~
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
~By Muriel Rukeyser ~
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
~By Franz Grillparzer ~
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
~By John Denham ~
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.
~By Robert Morgan ~
I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
~By Zona Gale ~
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
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 ~
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
~By Vladimir Nabokov ~
I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
~By J. Milton Hayes ~
Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
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 true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
~By Bertrand Russell ~
There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
~By Robert Adamson ~
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
~By Archibald MacLeish ~
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
~By Chaim Potok ~
Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
~By Compay Segundo ~
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
~By William Blake ~
In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
~By Archie Shepp ~
No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.
~By Thomas Harrison ~
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
~By Gaston Bachelard ~
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