Poetry Quotes
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One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.
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The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
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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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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
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But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
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Many years ago, in the late '70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire, read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.
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It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!
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There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
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After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
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For me, poetry is always a search for order.
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There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
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I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
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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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Incompossible, adj. Unable to exist if something else exists. Two things are incompossible when the world of being has scope enough for one of them, but not enough for both - as Walt Whitman's poetry and God's mercy to man.
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If you find that the reader of popular romances--however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances--goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.
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Sir, what is Poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is: but it is not easy to tell what it is.
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Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
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There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice,And wake from ignorance the Western World.
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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.
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Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.
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[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets.
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I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
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If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
