Poetry Quotes
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There Poetry shall tune her sacred voice,And wake from ignorance the Western World.
Samuel Johnson
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My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
Natasha Trethewey
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Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.
Natasha Trethewey
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People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Billy Collins
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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.
Laura Riding
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When I am writing poetry, I try to make my mind go a little lazy, to not think too much, as a way of opening up the part of the brain that makes poems. If I'm successful in this part of the process I'm often not. If my mind gets too lazy it will linger in familiar boring territory, it's like my mind can stroke the physical world.
Dawn Lundy Martin
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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.
Dave Franco
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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
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All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
Bosie
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Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most...are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.
James Fenton
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The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it.
Mary Quant
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One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
James Fenton
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I guess it was easier for me to find my voice in poetry than it was in fiction. I'm working on fiction again, and I find it a lot more difficult. It's a struggle. At a certain point, you have your voice and you go to it every time, so it's not like reinventing the wheel. That's the way I see it at least.
Barbara Hamby
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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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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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Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.
Bette Midler
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Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
James Schuyler
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I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Oscar Wilde
