Poetry Quotes
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I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?…It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.
Gabriela Mistral
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The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
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One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.
Chris Jordan
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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.
Randall Jarrell
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Not to know the Bible is, in some ways, to be illiterate, to neglect the very roots of philosophy, art, architecture, literature, poetry and music.
Chris Hedges
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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W. S. Merwin
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I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry.
Marina Tsvetaeva
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From my teenage years on, I sought out Native elders from many tribal nations and listened to their words. I also started a small press, The Greenfield Review Press, and became very involved with publishing the work of other American Indian authors, especially books of poetry.
Joseph Bruchac
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I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
Taylor Momsen
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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
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Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
Octavio Paz
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If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
Philippe Petit
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It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.
William Wordsworth
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Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa
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You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.
Felix Dennis
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Although I was quiet as a child, I had this resistless passion inside of me–this need and hunger to create my own world. Poetry filled that void, and its words fed that vital necessity of ownership.
Masiela Lusha
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden
