Poetry Quotes

• There is poetry and there is beauty in real sympathy; but there is more - there is action. The noblest and most powerful form of sympathy is not merely the responsive tear, the echoed sigh, the answering look; it is the embodiment of the sentiment in actual help.

  

  Octavius Winslow
  • Real
  • Help
  • Action

• Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.

  

  Donald Hall
  • Life
  • Important
  • Done

• One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

  

  Gaston Bachelard
  • Thinking
  • Reading
  • Poetry

• Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.

  

  John Barton
  • Nature
  • Poetry
  • Unique

• The divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page. (p. 227)

  

  Marshall McLuhan
  • Music
  • Poetry
  • Divorce

• Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

  

  Mary Oliver
  • Earth
  • Poetry

• I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

  

  Charles Olson
  • Live
  • Poetry

• An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.

  

  Agnes Varda
  • Time
  • Love
  • Wife

• Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.

  

  Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Art
  • Science
  • Math

• If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.

  

  John Barton
  • World
  • Poetry

• While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.

  

  Andrew Motion
  • Live
  • Culture
  • Choices

• 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
  • Important
  • Age
  • Years

• In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating qualityof the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

  

  Arthur Schopenhauer
  • Philosophy
  • Reflection
  • Resolutions

• A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.

  

  C. S. Lewis
  • Art
  • May
  • Literature

• In: 'Consistent Poetry Art', Schwitters' contribution to 'Magazine G', No. 3, 1924, ed. Hans Richter.

  

  Kurt Schwitters
  • Art
  • Poetry

• We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

  

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Poetry
  • Morality
  • Pantheists

• Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

  

  Randall Jarrell
  • Life
  • Poetry
  • Animal

• Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

  

  Johann Georg Hamann
  • Mother
  • Poetry

• If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.

  

  Luke Davies
  • Poetry

• I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

  

  James Laughlin
  • High
  • Poetry
  • Period

• Poetry takes you into the recesses of the language, the neglected corners, cracks and crannies and to the big sky of wonder. It opens the door to a critique without which you have rather boring analytical tools by comparison. To cultivate poetry means to stay with it. Not to abandon hope, but to abide.

  

  C.D. Wright
  • Hope
  • Mean
  • Wonder

• I've cancelled all my subscriptions to poetry magazines. I prefer to read the 'New Scientist.'

  

  Anne Stevenson
  • Poetry

• Poetry is, above all, a singing art of natural and magical connection because, though it is born out of one's person's solitude, it has the ability to reach out and touch in a humane and warmly illuminating way the solitude, even the loneliness, of others. That is why, to me, poetry is one of the most vital treasures that humanity possesses; it is a bridge between separated souls.

  

  Brendan Kennelly
  • Connection
  • Solitude
  • Souls

• The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

  

  Joseph Brodsky
  • Society
  • Poetry

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