Poetry Quotes
-
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
-
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.
-
I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
-
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
-
I originally went to school for writing, for non-fiction. I'm specifically a poetry major within literature, but I don't know.
-
I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
-
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
-
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.
-
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
-
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
-
SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.
-
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
-
The crown of literature is poetry.
-
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.
-
'Hamilton' is, of course, closely tied to the Obamas because Lin first performed the opening number at a White House poetry jam.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
-
I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.
