Poetry Quotes
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Wonder is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Alan Watts
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I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
Manuel Puig
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Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.
Margo Jefferson
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We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Gaston Bachelard
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And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
Banjo Paterson
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Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.
Philip Larkin
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Dancing is very like poetry. It's like poetic lyricism, sometimes, it's like the rawness of dramatic poetry, it's like the terror - or it can be like a terrible revelation of meaning. Because when you light on a word it strikes you to your heart.
Martha Graham
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If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
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Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
Chris Abani
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Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.
X. J. Kennedy
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Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo
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I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.
Daniel Woodrell
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Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot
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As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
Daniel Radcliffe
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The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Jacob Bronowski
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All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.
Flea
Red Hot Chili Peppers
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Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.
Daphne Gottlieb
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Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.
Ursula K. Le Guin
