Poetry Quotes
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I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.
Mae Whitman
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Oh yes, it was my Venice! Beautiful,
With melancholy, ghostly beauty—old,
And sorrowful, and weary—yet so fair,
So like a queen still, with her royal robes,
Full of harmonious colour, rent and worn!
Ada Cambridge
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'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.
Claire Tomalin
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Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginery being circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.
Francisco Goya
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There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired.
Edward Young
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...the best figurative poetry speaks not to the frivolous intellect, but (if anything does) straight to the heart; and does it better than plain prose. There seems then to be something which is better said with metaphor than without, which goes straighter to its mark by going crooked, and hits its aim exactly by flying off at tangents.
Austin Farrer
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Inspiration is inbreathing, indwelling, poetry can never be entirely willed. It may be true a poet is given only a single line but that line is a gift from the unconscious, intution, a perception.
Edward Hirsch
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The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
Patti Smith
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You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.
Robert Frost
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Meditating were my thoughts On the vain poetry of the bards of Brython. Making the best of themselves in the chief convention. Enough, the care of the smith’s sledge-hammer. I am in want of a stick, straitened in song, The fold of the bards, who knows it not?
Taliesin
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I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.
Amber Tamblyn
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.
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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Life is a b movie.It's stupid and it's strange,A directionless story,And the dialogue is lame.But in the he said, she said,Sometimes there's some poetry,If you turn your back long enough,And let it happen naturally.
Ani DiFranco
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My mum is a singer and harpist, and my dad writes fantastic poetry, so we've grown up around a lot of words and music.
Jessie Buckley
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What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it 'comes into and steadies the soul,' so that the reader feels himself 'a life prisoner, but reconciled.'
Randall Jarrell
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Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
Johann Georg Hamann
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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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Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.
Pablo Neruda
