poetry
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘poetry’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
-
“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.” -Raoul Vaneigem
-
“How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.” -Allen Tate
-
“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.” -William C. Bryant
-
“The nerds are my favourite sort of boys – any guy with a passion – whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it’s super sweet and it’s very attractive for a female.” -Teresa Palmer
-
“I’ve been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.” -Ed Westwick
-
“I think poetry is best read to oneself.” -Rickie Lee Jones
-
“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.” -Thom Gunn
-
“And I know I’m supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books… and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can’t quite muster the guilt anymore.” -Julianna Baggott
-
“It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.” -Peter Davison
-
“Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man’s expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.” -Salvatore Quasimodo
-
“Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.” -Wilfred Owen
-
“Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.” -Goldwin Smith
-
“Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There’s huge, visionary poetry in it.” -Simon Callow
-
“Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.” -David Hare
-
“Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.” -Cheryl Hines
-
“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.” -Michael Tippett
-
“The mystical poetry of William Blake’s artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.” -Bruce Dickinson
-
“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.” -Edith Hamilton
-
“If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.” -Robert Graves
-
“So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.” -June Jordan
-
“I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.” -Azar Nafisi
-
“I don’t think it’s always good to read lots of poetry.” -Amber Tamblyn
-
“Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.” -Richard Eyre
-
“I’ve done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I’ve compiled a book of poetry that’s completed, and two others I’m working on.” -Corin Nemec
-
-
“Children can write poetry and then, unless they’re poets, they stop when reach puberty.” -Dennis Potter
-
“Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth – the true poet is very near the oracle.” -Edwin Hubbel Chapin
-
“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.” -Sally Kirkland
-
“Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.” -Ajay Naidu
-
“You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.” -Carol Ann Duffy
-
“I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.” -Trevor Dunn
-
“Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.” -Walter Jon Williams
-
“It’s necessary to start most work alone. But I’m tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it’s borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.” -Jenny Holzer
-
“I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It’s not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.” -Saul Williams
-
“If you don’t mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there’s no poetry in that.” -Glen Hansard
-
“On the other hand, if there’s an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I’ve lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.” -Richard Serra
-
“I don’t think rap really fits in to ‘American Idol’ in the sense that I believe rap is an art form in itself more akin to poetry, more akin to drama, if you will.” -Nigel Lythgoe
-
-
“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.” -Lynn Johnston
-
“Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.” -Macklemore
-
“Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.” -Matthew Arnold
-
“I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.” -Jeffery Deaver
-
“I can find some way to make poetry out of my life’s experiences.” -Shelby Lynne
-
“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.” -Helen Thomas
-
“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.” -John Millington Synge
-
“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.” -Jim Jarmusch
-
“I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and… I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.” -P. J. Harvey
-
“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.” -Phil Ochs
-
“So I really began as a failed poet – although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.” -Nicholson Baker
-
“I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.” -Marguerite Young
-
“Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise – nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.” -Marilyn Hacker
-
“Poetry always runs away from you – it’s very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.” -Abbas Kiarostami
-
“I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.” -David Antin
-
“The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.” -Laura Marling
-
“Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.” -Gaston Bachelard
-
“In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.” -Phyllis McGinley
-
“The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.” -Frederick William Robertson
-
“The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.” -Ryszard Kapuscinski
-
“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.” -Judy Collins
-
“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.” -Lisa Bonet
-
“Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.” -Jerry B. Jenkins
-
“The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.” -Mark Knopfler
-
“It’s just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?” -Robin Wright Penn
-
“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.” -Allen Ginsberg
-
“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.” -Lafcadio Hearn
-
“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.” -Seamus Heaney
-
“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.” -Will Cuppy
-
“My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.” -Herschel Walker
-
“I know I’m not a wordsmith. And I don’t write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it’s really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.” -Candace Bushnell
-
“I’m not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on ‘Paradise Lost’ to translate it.” -Callan McAuliffe
-
“A lot of people think, ‘I’ll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn’t work out I’ll go get a law degree, do something else that’s more practical.’ For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.” -Brit Marling
-
“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.” -Boris Pasternak
-
“I don’t write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.” -Andrew Bird
-
“The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it’s not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I’ve met, and think they’re incredibly witty, inventive – there’s a lot of poetry there.” -Martin Amis
-
“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.” -Chaim Potok
-
“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.” -Steven Pinker
-
“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.” -Theodore Sturgeon
-
“For me, prose walks, poetry dances.” -James Broughton
-
“True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.” -Eugenio Montale
-
“When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous.” -Norman MacCaig
-
“I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.” -Emilio Estevez
-
“I wrote things for the school’s newspaper, and – like all teenagers – I dabbled in poetry.” -Stephen Colbert
-
“Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.” -Richard Eberhart
-
“I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one’s done it this way.” -Kenny Loggins
-
“More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.” -Andrew Motion
-
“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.” -Huston Smith
-
“The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.” -William Shenstone
-
“Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.” -Robert Staughton Lynd
-
“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.” -Walter Pater
-
“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.” -Jacques Derrida
-
“I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.” -Robert Morgan
-
-
“I write all the time – I write poetry, I love to write.” -Colin Quinn
-
“With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.” -Peter Abrahams
-
“It’s like I understand images and some people understand poetry.” -Samantha Morton
-
-
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” -Mario Cuomo
-
“Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.” -Mary Oliver
-
“Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.” -Terry Eagleton
-
“Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.” -Tahar Ben Jelloun
-
“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.” -Walter Savage Landor
-
“What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.” -Arnold Palmer
-
“A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.” -Jose Marti
-
“Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.” -Wislawa Szymborska
-
“I was trained as an actress. But I wasn’t a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.” -Jenny Eclair
-
“I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it’s just obtuse to them. It’s hard to relate to.” -Jewel
-
“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.” -Christopher Fry
-
“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.” -Hu Shih
-
“There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.” -George Will
-
“The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.” -Rita Dove
-
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.” -Adrienne Rich
-
“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.” -Lascelles Abercrombie
-
“As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.” -Thomas B. Macaulay
-
-
“Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.” -David Lee Roth
-
“I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.” -Taylor Momsen
-
“I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.” -Ben Okri
-
“I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.” -Howard Nemerov
-
“My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.” -Guy Johnson
-
“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.” -Raymond Chandler
-
“In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.” -Danielle Steel
-
“It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.” -Brooks Atkinson
-
“Marriage – a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.” -Beverley Nichols
-
“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.” -James Gates Percival
-
“I like the beauty of Faulkner’s poetry. But I don’t like his themes, not at all.” -Manuel Puig
-
“And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it’s just been so worth the effort. It’s like I’m planting a garden in my head.” -Jane Campion
-
“Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.” -Joseph Brodsky
-
“Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.” -Antonin Artaud
-
-
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.” -Yevgeny Yevtushenko
-
“If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.” -Wallace Stevens
-
“I never thought I’d be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading…
-
“My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother’s into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.” -Michael Sheen
-
“I’ve written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.” -Jordin Sparks
-
“Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it’s like a jackhammer.” -Bette Midler
-
“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.” -Mario Batali
-
“I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.” -Rick Springfield
-
“Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.” -Elia Kazan
-
“A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.” -Karen Armstrong
-
-
“Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.” -Ezra Pound
-
“I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching – but that won’t pay the Bergdorf’s bill. I think I’ll move to somewhere life is cheaper.” -Erica Jong
-
“You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith’s autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.”…
-
“The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.” -Jean Giraudoux
-
“You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.” -Fred Durst
-
“Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.” -Jose Ortega y Gasset
-
“Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream – they go together.” -Nikki Giovanni
-
“It’s always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It’s hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.” -Tom Hanks
-
“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.” -Thomas Mann
-
“I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.” -Russell Simmons
-
“Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.” -Aung San Suu Kyi
-
“Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.” -Daisaku Ikeda
-
“When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.” -Joseph Gordon-Levitt
-
“There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.” -Edward Young
-
“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?” -Joyce Carol Oates
-
“Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.” -Russell Baker
-
“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.” -Julio Cortazar
-
“You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there’s a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there’s so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.” -Lena Dunham
-
“It’s something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else’s poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you’re too awkward to do it.” -John Cusack
-
“You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don’t realize it.” -Sherman Alexie
-
“I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.” -Amy Winehouse
-
“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.” -Edward Koch
-
“One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.” -Stephen Sondheim
-
“The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.” -Lewis Thomas
-
“What I wanted to do in rock ‘n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.” -Patti Smith
-
“I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he’s going to write poetry or songs.” -Roger Waters
-
“In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.” -Paul Valery
-
“Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.” -Don Marquis
-
“Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.” -Muhammad Iqbal
-
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.” -Horace Walpole
-
“Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.” -James Buchan
-
“Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn’t call myself a poet.” -David Duchovny
-
“The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.” -Margaret Walker
-
“I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.” -Elizabeth Edwards
-
“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?…
-
“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.” -Anna Quindlen
-
“Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.” -Jorge Luis Borges
-
“Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.” -Federico Fellini
View More Quotations – By Author.
View More Quotations – By Topic.
Home.