Poetry Quotes
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All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe
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American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.
Joseph Brodsky
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Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
James Martineau
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Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
Daisaku Ikeda
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Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
Madeleine L'Engle
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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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Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.
Mattie Stepanek
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The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards.
Sara Teasdale
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There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
Billy Collins
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There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
Phil Ochs
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I've always had an affinity for writers who have a poetry background, so I always liked Tennessee Williams.
Kenny Leon
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We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.
Freya Stark
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I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.
Philippe Petit
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There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around.
That the colt from Old Regret had got away.
Banjo Paterson
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I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.
Eavan Boland
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I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
Langston Hughes
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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
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Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
Walter Savage Landor
