Poetry Quotes
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
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
Peter Davison
Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.
Vikram Seth
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.
Jacques Lacan
That's the thing with me being a former athlete: in the way I attack characters and attack poetry is from the base of being an athlete.
Omari Hardwick
I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.
Tony Kushner
Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.
Irving Howe
There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.
Douglas Brinkley
Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.
James Fenton
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
Federico Fellini
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
W. S. Merwin
On the one hand, our minds try to probe the ephemeral reality of the quantum world; on the other, we talk, think, and act in a language adapted for discussing trees, rocks, and automobiles -- as well as poetry and emotions.
F. David Peat
He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe
I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
David Knopfler
Dire Straits
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.
A. R. Ammons
I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
Omari Hardwick
My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.
Jamila Woods
If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.
Miguel de Cervantes
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
I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Donald Hall
