Poetry Quotes
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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
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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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Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
John McWhorter
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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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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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What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.
Alex Garland
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France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire
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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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Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts,or emotions.
Lisa See
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Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.
David Lee Roth
Van Halen
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I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
H. P. Lovecraft
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My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
W. H. Auden
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Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.
C.D. Wright
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Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
Jonathan Galassi
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
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If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.
Brad Leithauser
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I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope
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The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
