Poetry Quotes
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I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.
Katherine Anne Porter
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It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.
John Cusack
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike
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I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.
Anne Waldman
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Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.
Pablo Neruda
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One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science in the contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled wit awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation.
Ervin Laszlo
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For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").
Umberto Eco
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So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
Nicholson Baker
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The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema.
Derek Jarman
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Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty.
Lionel Trilling
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Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
Christopher Koch
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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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The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up … then down … then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It’s a tired reading style. I’m sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves—as they’ve been arranged—could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name.
Gabrielle Hamilton
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I know it's weird, but it does make it easier to write poetry in perl.
Larry Wall
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For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
James Broughton
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Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.
James Buchan
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Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.
Max Planck
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And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.
Jane Campion
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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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The greatest productions of art, whether painting, music, sculpture or poetry, have invariably this quality-something approaching the work of God.
D. T. Suzuki
