Poetry Quotes
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Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
Mary Oliver
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I know my voice has a limited range of motion; I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona; I often wish I were him and not me.
Billy Collins
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Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
James Fenton
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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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If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable.
Bob Black
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Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.
Megan McCafferty
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I had originally planned to do musical theatre and be on Broadway, but then my love for poetry also set in. Once that happened, I became torn between a career as an English teacher or a music teacher.
Khalid
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I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
Kenneth Koch
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Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
Amy Clampitt
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With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Peter Abrahams
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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 came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.
Patti Smith
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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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I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
Jonathan Galassi
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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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'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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Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
Ezra Pound
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I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.
Jamila Woods
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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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Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.
Derek Walcott
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Every other art,-as poetry, music, painting,-may be practised without the process showing forth the rules according to which it is conducted ;-but in the self-cognizant art of the philosopher, no step can be taken without declaring the grounds upon which it proceeds.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
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Consciousness is not wholly, nor even primarily a device for receiving sense-impressions. ...there is another outlook than the scientific one, because in practice a more transcendental outlook is almost universally admitted. ...who does not prize these moments that reveal to us the poetry of existence?
Arthur Eddington
