Poetry Quotes
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I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope
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Emerson writes in his Journal that all men try their hands at poetry, but few know which their poems are. The poets are not those who write poems, but those who know which of the things they write are poems.
Carl Andre
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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 want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.
C.D. Wright
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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.
Jim Morrison
The Doors
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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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The cover was pebbled black leather, the pages onionskin, and he opened it carefully. It was his first Bible, the one his mother had given him, the one that had taken its time showing him what he was supposed to do with his life, his size, that voice of his. It was the one used for his ordination, and when he had buried his mother on a autumn hillside in Tennesee five years ago. King James. He didn't care about the scholars or the accuracy or the bringing of his church into whatever century they claimed it was these days; he cared about the poetry, and about the comfort it brought to those who needed to hear it.
Charles L. Grant
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I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.
Andrew Hozier-Byrne
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To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.
Jacqueline Woodson
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Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
George Murray
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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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It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.
Jamila Woods
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I don't like scaring people off. When I tell people I'm a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry, and they think I'm weird.
Amy Gerstler
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Where I come from, we sing poetry.
Derek Walcott
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Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
Mary Karr
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It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
Thomas Carlyle
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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
