Poetry Quotes
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.
Wallace Stevens
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I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.
Billy Collins
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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
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Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.
Aaron Belz
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My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
Dylan Walsh
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I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.
C.D. Wright
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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 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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One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.
Gaston Bachelard
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery
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The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.
David Whyte
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Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats