Poetry Quotes
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
William Shenstone
Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.
Babette Deutsch
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot
Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.
Diane Ackerman
I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.
Chrisette Michele Payne
No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.
Knut Hamsun
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
James Fenton
If Poverty be a Title to Poetry, I am sure nobody can dispute mine. I own myself of the Company of Beggars; and I make one at their Weekly Festivals at St. Giles's. I have a small Yearly Salary for my Catches, and am welcome to a Dinner there whenever I please, which is more than most Poets can say.
John Gay
It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!
Edith Schaeffer
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
Samantha Morton
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
The idea is to make the script out of a political analysis and then to convey that - sometimes in poetry, sometimes science, sometimes all it takes is a film. The film itself is less and less spectacular because I think very strongly now the more spectacular you are, the more you are absorbed by the things you are trying to destroy.
Jean-Luc Godard
