Poetry Quotes
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Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.
Victor Hugo
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Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
Amy Lowell
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In The New Poetry I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.
Al Alvarez
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I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.
Charles Olson
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Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones
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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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Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
John Masefield
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We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject. ... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.
Washington Allston
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If poetry were nothing but texture, Dylan Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell
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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
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The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.
Louis Dudek
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Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
Joseph Brodsky
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Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats
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One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
Billy Collins
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I believe that Jesus was both priest and poet. Imagine those powerful parables! My experience as a priest tells me it's not possible to reach the hearts of the congregants without a bit of poetry and storytelling.
Uwem Akpan
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When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions - though there were not enough women - who were very much more influenced by, say, Asian forms or by Mantra or by thinking politically through their work in deeper ways really stuck with me.
Anne Waldman
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Poetry is what gets lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.
Robert Frost
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We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.
Billy Collins
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People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
Joseph Brodsky
