Poetry Quotes
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One can be well-bred and write bad poetry.
Moliere
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I like to write about things that are dark or twisted. Where the poetry seems to be is when you start in the dark and reach for the light - that's what makes it not depressing to me.
Josh Homme
Queens of the Stone Age
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I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau
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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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Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Aristotle
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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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I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.
Blake Jenner
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I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.
Maya Angelou
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Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
W. H. Auden
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Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.
J. Courtney Sullivan
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The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don't know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other.
Brenda Hillman
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Oh sky, without me, do not change,
Oh moon, without me, do not shine;
Oh earth, without me, do not grow,
Oh time, without me, do not go.
...Oh, you cannot go, without me.
Rumi
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Slogan-making is not poetry.
Ernesto Cardenal
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There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.
W. S. Merwin
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Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.
Billy Collins
