Poetry Quotes
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Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
James Laughlin
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The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
Maya Angelou
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The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
Martin Amis
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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.
Lucy Larcom
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The difference between the casual impression and the intensified image is about as great as that separating the average business letter from a poem. If you choose your subject selectively—intuitively—the camera can write poetry.
Harry Callahan
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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.
C. K. Williams
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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
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By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
David Whyte
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That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.
David Amram
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Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It's much more mainstream than anyone thought.
Maria Shriver
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A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad - and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
Randall Jarrell
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'Then one can't make a living out of poetry?''Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.'
Jack London
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Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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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.
Elizabeth Strout
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If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets as Raphael painted pictures, sweep streets as Michelangelo carved marble, sweep streets as Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.
Alice Oswald
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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.
Florence Nightingale
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Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!
Frank Iero
My Chemical Romance
