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 ~
Poetry is life distilled.
~By Gwendolyn Brooks ~
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
~By James Joyce ~
But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
~By Mark Strand ~
When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.
~By Story Musgrave ~
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
~By Robert Graves ~
There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
~By Allen Tate ~
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 wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
~By Jack Bowman ~
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
~By Peter Davison ~
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
~By George Farquhar ~
The cliche is dead poetry.
~By Gerald Brenan ~
Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
~By Story Musgrave ~
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 ~
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
~By Vladimir Nabokov ~
Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.
~By Adrian Mitchell ~
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
~By John Muir ~
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.
~By Joseph Roux ~
In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.
~By Larry Summers ~
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
~By Lucille Clifton ~
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
~By John Barton ~
The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
~By Louis Kronenberger ~
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
~By John Barton ~
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
~By Isaac Rosenberg ~
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
~By Stephen Spender ~
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 ~
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 ~
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
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 ~
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
~By William C. Bryant ~
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
~By Jim Jarmusch ~
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
~By Edwin Hubbel Chapin ~
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 ~
But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
Wine is bottled poetry.
~By Robert Louis Stevenson ~
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
~By Wilfred Owen ~
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
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 ~
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
~By Muhammad Iqbal ~
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 ~
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
~By John Keats ~
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
~By Robert Morgan ~
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
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 ~
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 ~
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
~By George Sand ~
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
~By Aristotle ~
There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
~By George Will ~
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
~By Tom Holt ~
Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
~By F. L. Lucas ~
Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
~By James Schuyler ~
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
~By John C. Ransom ~
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
~By Joseph Roux ~
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
~By Julie Taymor ~
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.
~By Mark Strand ~
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.
~By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.
~By Patti Smith ~
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 ~
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 ~
Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
~By Beverley Nichols ~
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
~By John Barton ~
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 ~
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 ~
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
~By Danielle Steel ~
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.
~By Louis-Ferdinand Celine ~
So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.
~By Aaron Neville ~
Poetry is composing for the breath.
~By Peter Davison ~
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 ~
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 ~
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
~By David Hare ~
Superstition is the poetry of life.
~By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
~By Philip Levine ~
I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.
~By Martin C. Smith ~
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.
~By A. R. Ammons ~
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 ~
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
~By Harry Mathews ~
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
~By John F. Kennedy ~
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 ~
Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.
~By Goldwin Smith ~
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
~By Philip Levine ~
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
~By James Branch Cabell ~
He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.
~By Salvatore Quasimodo ~
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
~By Wallace Stevens ~
I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
~By David Knopfler ~
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
~By Dennis Potter ~
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