Poetry Quotes
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I dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.
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The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
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I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
James Tate -
Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.
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Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.
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Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.
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A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born … in poetry.
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I believe the best poetry of our times is growing too artistic; the study is too visible. If freedom and naturalness are lost out of poetry, everything worth having is lost.
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Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
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Prose is in fact the museum where the dead images of verse are preserved. In 'Notes', prose is 'a museum where all the old weapons of poetry kept.
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What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
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If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'
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And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
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So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
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To paraphrase Robin Williams’s compelling teacher character in Dead Poets Society: We don’t study poetry to get an “A,” to graduate, to get a job, to make money, to meet material needs. Rather, “we read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering . . . these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love . . . these are what we stay alive for.
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I'm separated by other performers with whom I might be lumped, since what I say is so intensely personal. I'm anti-art and anti-poetry. As much as possible, I want to inflict my personal pain on the rest of society.
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American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
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Oh yes, it was my Venice! Beautiful, With melancholy, ghostly beauty—old, And sorrowful, and weary—yet so fair, So like a queen still, with her royal robes, Full of harmonious colour, rent and worn!
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She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
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Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
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Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
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Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
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History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
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Poetry is not efficient. If you want to learn how to cook a lobster, it’s probably best not to look to poetry. But if you want to see the word lobster in all its reactant oddity, its pied beauty, as if for the first time, go to poetry. And if you want to know what it’s like to be that lobster in the pot, that’s in poetry too.
