Poetry Quotes
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'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.
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I would like my books to stand as a tool to unbind children from expectations of poetry because it should free the child to self-expression and exploration.
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I am not ashamed to admit that I belong to those who fantasize that literature is capable of bringing new horizons and new perspectives - philosophical, religious, aesthetical and even social. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
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I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.
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The Gettysburg Adress has been included, of late, in several anthologies of poetry. It actually meets the major requirement of all poetry: It is a mellifluous and emotional statement of the obviously not true. The men who fought for self-determination at Gettysburg were not the Federals but the Confederates.
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I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
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For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
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My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
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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 -
I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
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Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.
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Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
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'Then one can't make a living out of poetry?''Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.'
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For me, poetry is always a search for order.
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I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.
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You're in high school, and you're telling your friends that you're skipping lunch to go write poetry, and they were all questioning my sexuality.
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Definitely for writing, what inspires me is poetry, which I have next to me all the time because I think they're doing what I'm doing, but much harder, more condensed. It's the same job, but they're more talented. All of them. So I just steal openly from them.
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Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.
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Our family are an alternate stratification of poetry and mathematics.
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While some mothers sing lullabies to their children, my mother read me poetry. And to this day, I associate my strongest and most insistent feelings with words lyrically organized on a page.
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Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
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The poet who speaks out of the deepest instincts of man will be heard. The poet who creates a myth beyond the power of man to realize is gagged at the peril of the group that binds him. He is the true revolutionary: he builds a new world.
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I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
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Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
