Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
~By John Keats ~
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
~By Walter Pater ~
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 ~
If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
~By John Barton ~
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
~By Edmund Burke ~
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
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 ~
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
~By John Barton ~
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
~By Emily Dickinson ~
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 ~
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 ~
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
~By George Murray ~
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
~By Lucille Clifton ~
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 ~
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
~By Robert Morgan ~
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.
~By Thomas Harrison ~
I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
~By Bobby McFerrin ~
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
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.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
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 ~
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.
~By Paul Dirac ~
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 ~
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 ~
Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
~By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~
I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.
~By Marguerite Young ~
That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
~By David Amram ~
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
~By Robert Graves ~
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
~By Anatole Broyard ~
Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
~By James Schuyler ~
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
~By Wislawa Szymborska ~
I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
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 ~
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
~By John Drinkwater ~
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've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.
~By Jeffery Deaver ~
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
~By Gustave Flaubert ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
~By Anthony Hecht ~
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 love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
~By Robert Morgan ~
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
~By Edgar Allan Poe ~
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
~By Khalil Gibran ~
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 ~
I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
~By Judy Collins ~
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 ~
I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
~By Peter Porter ~
Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
~By John Cage ~
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
~By Joseph Brodsky ~
Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.
~By Jack Prelutsky ~
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 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 ~
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
~By John Updike ~
I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
~By Michael Graves ~
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
~By Robert Hass ~
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 ~
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
~By Thom Gunn ~
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
~By Jean de la Bruyere ~
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
~By John Drinkwater ~
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
~By Isaac Rosenberg ~
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
~By Antonin Artaud ~
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 ~
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.
~By Story Musgrave ~
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
~By Randall Jarrell ~
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
~By Jacques Derrida ~
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 ~
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
~By Joseph Joubert ~
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
~By John Ruskin ~
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 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 ~
Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
~By Compay Segundo ~
Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.
~By Harry Mathews ~
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
~By Allen Tate ~
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
~By Leonard Cohen ~
Personality is everything in art and poetry.
~By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
~By Mario Cuomo ~
The crown of literature is poetry.
~By W. Somerset Maugham ~
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
~By John Ruskin ~
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
~By Juan Ramon Jimenez ~
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
~By W. H. Auden ~
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.
~By Amanda Seyfried ~
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
~By John Drinkwater ~
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
~By Edgar Allan Poe ~
The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
~By Howard Nemerov ~
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
~By Sally Kirkland ~
The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.
~By Bruce Dickinson ~
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
~By William Wordsworth ~
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
~By David Hockney ~
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