Poetry Quotes
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A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry is a standard Oscar Williams production... ...the book has the merit of containing a considerably larger selection of Oscar Williams’s poems than I have seen in any other anthology. There are nine of his poems - and five of Hardy’s. It takes a lot of courage to like your own poetry almost twice as well as Hardy’s.
Randall Jarrell
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Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means.
F. R. Leavis
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I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
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Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
Archibald MacLeish
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The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.
Gaston Bachelard
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When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
Elizabeth McCracken
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For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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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 is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Mark Strand
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It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
John Millington Synge
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Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.
Marv Levy
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I was quiet, and I was artistic. I liked writing poetry, and that was very strange, so I was bullied a lot.
Nelsan Ellis
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Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.
Boris Pasternak
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I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.
Paula McLain
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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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I believe the best poetry of our times is growing too artistic; the study is too visible. If freedom and naturalness are lost out of poetry, everything worth having is lost.
Lucy Larcom
