Poetry Quotes
-
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
Camille Paglia
-
If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.
T. S. Eliot
-
I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Jesmyn Ward
-
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
-
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
-
The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.
Natasha Trethewey
-
Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
Mary Lambert
-
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
-
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
-
The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.
W. S. Merwin
-
I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.
Jenny Zhang
-
I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
Joe Haldeman
-
I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
Gary Shteyngart
-
I love poetry. It's at the heart of everything I do. Poetry transforms what we call language, and uses language as the stuff to become something else. I get spun around by what happens in words. When that occurs, it inspires images that seem so original to me as an artist, even though I'm following what the poem has offered.
Ashley Bryan
-
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
Christopher Fry
-
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Robert Frost
-
My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.
Jess Walter
-
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
