Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
~By Johann G. Hamann ~
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
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 ~
Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
~By Patrick White ~
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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 ~
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
~By A. E. Housman ~
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 ~
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
~By James Broughton ~
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
~By Thomas Lynch ~
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
~By Anthony Hecht ~
There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.
~By Gyorgy Ligeti ~
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
~By James Laughlin ~
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
~By Russell Baker ~
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.
~By Peter Steele ~
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
~By Goldwin Smith ~
There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
~By Anna Quindlen ~
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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 ~
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
~By Giorgos Seferis ~
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
~By Robert Morgan ~
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
~By Lord Byron ~
He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.
~By John Colville ~
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
~By Marianne Moore ~
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 ~
Why should poetry have to make sense?
~By Charlie Chaplin ~
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
~By Peter Davison ~
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
~By Steven Pinker ~
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 ~
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
~By James Branch Cabell ~
Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
~By George William Curtis ~
That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
~By James Broughton ~
When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
~By Mario Batali ~
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.
~By Roger McGough ~
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
~By H. L. Mencken ~
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
~By Danielle Steel ~
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
~By John Drinkwater ~
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
~By John Barton ~
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
~By Robert Frost ~
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
~By Carol Ann Duffy ~
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.
~By Archibald MacLeish ~
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 ~
I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
~By James Laughlin ~
Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
~By Robert Morgan ~
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
~By Denis Diderot ~
Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
~By James Schuyler ~
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
~By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
~By John Ciardi ~
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
~By Edmund Burke ~
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
~By John Barton ~
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
~By Alfred Edward Housman ~
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
~By Edward Koch ~
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
~By Robert Morgan ~
I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
~By Tom Wesselmann ~
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 ~
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
~By Phil Ochs ~
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
~By Voltaire ~
Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
~By Beverley Nichols ~
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
~By Robert Morgan ~
There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
~By Rita Dove ~
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
~By Peter Davison ~
I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
~By Stevie Smith ~
I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
~By Theodore Sturgeon ~
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
~By David Hare ~
I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.
~By Louise Jameson ~
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
~By Russell Baker ~
Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.
~By Andrea Dworkin ~
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
~By Allen Ginsberg ~
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 ~
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
~By Peter Davison ~
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
~By Michael Tippett ~
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
~By June Jordan ~
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.
~By John Barton ~
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.
~By Helen Thomas ~
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
~By Gustave Flaubert ~
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 is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
~By Adrienne Rich ~
I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.
~By Edmund C. Stedman ~
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
~By Allen Ginsberg ~
The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
~By Gilbert Murray ~
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
~By Christopher Fry ~
The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
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