Poetry Quotes
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Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.
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Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.
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I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
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No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job....Poetry..remains one person talking to another....no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.
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Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
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Making love is, simply put, poetry in motion.
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The specific excellence of verbal expression in poetry is to be clear without being low.
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
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Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.
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Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.
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Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.
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Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.
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In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
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When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'
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Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
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With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
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I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.
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But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
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I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
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I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
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Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
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I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.
