Poetry Quotes
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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
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I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.
Pauley Perrette
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In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
Fanny Howe
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But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
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Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
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I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.
J. Carter Brown
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Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
Donald Hall
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I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.
C. K. Williams
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I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter...'
Gary Oldman
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Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.
Orson F. Whitney
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I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.
Cynthia Voigt
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Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
Omari Hardwick
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As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch
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Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W. S. Merwin
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I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
Adrian McKinty
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Ever been kidnapped by a poet if i were a poet i'd kidnap you put you in my phrases and meter.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
Lascelles Abercrombie
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I have my books And my poetry to protect me; I am shielded in my armor, Hiding in my room, safe within my womb. I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock, I am an island.
Paul Simon
Simon & Garfunkel
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Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.
B. B. King
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Everybody nose dive, hold your breath, count to five. Back slap, booby trap, cover it up in bubble wrap. Room shake, earth quake, find a way to stay awake. It's going to blow, it's going to break, this is more than I can take.
Peter Gabriel
Genesis
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What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.
Fernand Leger
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I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.
Walter Dean Myers
