Poetry Quotes
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Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.
Saint-John Perse
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The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
Gaston Bachelard
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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
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Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Octavio Paz
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In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
Billy Collins
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The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
Derek Walcott
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Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, 'What man does with his aloneness.'
Kenneth Rexroth
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Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.
Henrik Ibsen
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The Steinway piano - with its beauty and power - is the perfect medium for expressing the performer's art, drama and poetry.
Van Cliburn
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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
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The reader who is illuminated is, in a real sense, the poem.
Henry Major Tomlinson
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On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
Viggo Mortensen
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Trying to make a living from poetry is like putting chains on butterfly wings.
A. R. Ammons
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Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T. S. Eliot
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If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.
Philip Sidney
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I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.
Floyd Skloot
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The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.
Natasha Trethewey
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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
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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
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I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.
Donald Hall
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Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Comte de Lautreamont
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I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
Peter Davison
