Poetry Quotes
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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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Hymns are the poetry of the people.
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I often say poetry was my first love.
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Poetry is very crafted. You can't have too many words. It needs compression. It has to be spare, just the right number of words.
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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.
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I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.
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Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.
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My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I've had some really lovely parties and poetry readings up there.
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Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
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I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
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A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
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If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
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In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.
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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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Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. ...that is a feature of the musical brain.
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A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.
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Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
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Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today - in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped - always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!
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Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.
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Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
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What is science? yard-measure and scale to philosophy, expert-accountant, bank clerk. What is poetry? miserable, ill-fed, underpaid, unionized labourer, pleased to oblige, grateful for work, flattering himself that poverty makes him an aristocrat.
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I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
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To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
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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.
