Poetry Quotes
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I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
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Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem - don’t even have a story. Don’t have a writer. If most poetry doesn’t seem to be in any sense confessional, it’s because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it’s almost entirely successful.
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My idea of good poetry is any dog doing anything.
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I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
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Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
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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.
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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.
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With 140 words in Chinese, you really can write a novel. Most of Confucius’s sentences are only four words, so 140 words might take his whole life to write. And you can discuss the most profound ideas related to democracy, freedom, poetry.
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Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.
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To me, poetry is spoken - not exclusively, but there's a mix of languages in it. That's what I liked about 'For the Confederate Dead;' it has many different tones to it.
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Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.
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It's as serious as anyone ever gets, you know. It's just words. It's just good poetry.
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Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.
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Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?
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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?
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No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.
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Poetry’s a mere drug, Sir.
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The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
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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.
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The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.
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Professionally he declines and falls, and as a friend he drops into poetry.
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The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.
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Compose aloud: poetry is a sound.
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I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.
