Poetry Quotes
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I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.
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I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
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While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
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It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.
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I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.
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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.
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The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
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Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
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Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.
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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
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You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
