Poetry Quotes
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To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
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That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
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Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
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Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
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If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
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When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.
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I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
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I'm a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.
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I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
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Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
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Concrete poetry began for me with the extraordinary sense that the syntax I had been using , the movement of language within me, af a physical level was no longer there. So it had to be replaced with something else with a syntax and movement that would be true of this new feeling.
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Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
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I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.
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For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
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Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.
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If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
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I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
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The crown of literature is poetry.
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I originally went to school for writing, for non-fiction. I'm specifically a poetry major within literature, but I don't know.
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I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
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Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
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Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
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Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
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I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.
