Poetry Quotes
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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.
Alice McDermott
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And at some point I would like to talk my publisher into doing an anthology of my poetry alongside some teen readers' poetry. It would be fun, and really wonderful to get their stuff out there.
Ellen Hopkins
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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.
Barbara Feldon
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The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?
John Crowe Ransom
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Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it...
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
Pablo Neruda
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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.
Samuel Johnson
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Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
James Laughlin
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One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.
Alice Oswald
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The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
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If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.
Mary Karr
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I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.
John F. Kerry
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The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.
Rabindranath Tagore
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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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If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.
T. S. Eliot
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I often say poetry was my first love.
Luis Alberto Urrea
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Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
Antonin Artaud
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Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
Aaron Belz
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The motto of his Robinson Jeffers’s work is 'More! More!'-but as Tolstoy says, 'A wee bit omitted, overemphasized, or exaggerated in poetry, and there is no contagion'; and Frost, bearing him out, says magnificently: 'A very little of anything goes a long way in a work of art.'
Randall Jarrell
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I write poetry, and I put it to a beat - I mean, that's what they call rap.
Keith Stanfield
