Joseph Brodsky Quotes

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

Joseph Brodsky

• Poetry

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

  

  Ed Westwick
  • Work
  • Writing
  • Poetry

• I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

  

  Felix Dennis
  • People
  • Care
  • Poetry

• For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

  

  F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • You
  • Poetry
  • Quit

• Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

  

  Vikram Seth
  • Experience
  • Poetry
  • Sad

• I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.

  

  Natasha Trethewey
  • Think
  • Faith
  • Poetry

• I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

  

  Pablo Neruda
  • Up
  • Poetry
  • Rain

• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

  

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko
  • Poetry
  • Poet
  • Anything

• When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.

  

  S. Ansky
  • Work
  • Literature
  • Jews

• I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

  

  Manuel Puig
  • Poetry
  • Beauty
  • Themes

• My fashion statement depends on my mood. I am more of a tomboy when dressing up, and I have never worn pink in my entire life.

  

  Lalaine Vergara-Paras
  • Life
  • Fashion
  • Mood

• If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.

  

  Gary Hume
  • Poetry
  • Hunting
  • Desperate

• 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
  • Done
  • Art
  • Help

• Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

  

  Octavio Paz
  • Society
  • Poetry
  • Morality

• Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

  

  Ian Hamilton Finlay
  • Up
  • Different
  • Bad

• Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

  

  Tahar Ben Jelloun
  • Words
  • Relationship
  • Poetry

• Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

  

  Octavio Paz
  • Experience
  • Poetry
  • Risks

• Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

  

  Orson F. Whitney
  • History
  • Mother
  • Poetry

• I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

  

  J. Carter Brown
  • Music
  • Poetry
  • Arts

• Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Words
  • Poetry
  • Inspiration

• An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.

  

  Agnes Varda
  • Time
  • Love
  • Wife

• Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

  

  Steve Earle
  • Poetry
  • Hardest

• I like when a girl knows what she looks like and dresses to accentuate those features.

  

  Zac Efron
  • Girl
  • Dresses
  • Features

• Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.

  

  Elizabeth Moon
  • People
  • Sometimes
  • Wonder

• Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

  

  Joseph Brodsky
  • Poetry