Poetry Quotes
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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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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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And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
Mark Strand
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I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.
Jason Mraz
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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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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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Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.
David Duchovny
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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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Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.
Ivan Turgenev
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In The New Poetry I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.
Al Alvarez
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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
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Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
Joseph Brodsky
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I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.
Ellen Hopkins
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I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
Jerry Hall
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Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.
Wallace Stevens
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When I began to write as a very young person in a rigidly racist and inhibited colonial society, I felt, as many others did, that I existed marginally on the edge of the world of ideas, of imagination and beauty. These, taking shape in poetry and fiction, drama, painting and sculpture, were exclusive to that distant realm known as 'overseas'.
Nadine Gordimer
