Poetry Quotes
-
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
Mark Strand
-
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
-
Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before, it was neither rhyme nor reason.
Thomas More
-
For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.
Arthur Rimbaud
-
The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.
William Empson
-
I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
James Laughlin
-
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire
-
Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.
Josephine Hart
-
That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.
Derek Walcott
-
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike
-
Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.
Leon Black
-
Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.
C. K. Williams
-
All of the arts are kin - music and sculpture and dance, those are wordless art forms. But poetry is defined by language. Of course, each art is distinct, and has its own character - not just in terms of media, but in terms of what seems to lie at the heart of it.
Campbell McGrath
-
I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'
Don McLean
-
To be honest, I wasn't crazy about the kind of poetry I found in high school English books. I didn't get really excited about poetry until I discovered Lorca in college. If it wasn't for surrealism, I'm not sure I'd have become so involved in poetry. I was attracted by the extravagant imagery and elements of fantasy. This was in the '70s and it seemed to fit the psychedelic mood of the times. I found it liberating.
Elaine Equi
-
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
Gloria Estefan
Miami Sound Machine
-
Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama. (p. 275)
Marshall McLuhan
-
Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that's how I always try to start my thoughts.
Benjamin Clementine
-
Prophecy is a poetry of change, social, political, moral, spiritual. It was with the prophetic model in mind that Shelley wrote of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Allegra Goodman
-
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
-
For me, poetry is a form of activism. And that word enables the labelers, and also gives them a rash.
Fady Joudah
-
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
