Poetry Quotes
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Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
Yusef Komunyakaa
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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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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.
Natasha Trethewey
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I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.
Candace Bushnell
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I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
Taylor Momsen
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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.
David Antin
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Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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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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We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Elvis Costello
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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.
Octavio Paz
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
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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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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
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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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It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.
John Singer Sargent
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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
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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.
Daphne Gottlieb
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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W. S. Merwin
