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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 Jenny Zhang
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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 T. S. Eliot
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		I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.
	
	  Anya Taylor-Joy Anya Taylor-Joy
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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 Christopher Fry
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		What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.
	
	  Elizabeth Smart Elizabeth Smart
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		If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
	
	  Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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		I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.
	
	  Jerry Spinelli Jerry Spinelli
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		As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.
	
	  Jane Campion Jane Campion
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		Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.
	
	  Henrik Ibsen Henrik Ibsen
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		Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.
	
	  Anna Jameson Anna Jameson
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		Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
	
	  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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		I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
	
	  Tahar Ben Jelloun Tahar Ben Jelloun
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		Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
	
	  David Josiah Brewer David Josiah Brewer
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		As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
	
	  T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot
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		I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
	
	  Keith Haring Keith Haring
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		The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
	
	  Derek Walcott Derek Walcott