Poetry Quotes
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We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
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We have a motto at Naropa: 'Keep the world safe for poetry.' It's humorous but has some real bite to it. If the world is safe for poetry, it can be safe for many other things.
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Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.
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I have often said that I think children's books are like poetry. Finding the exact right words to tell a story is something all writers, regardless of genre, are challenged to do, but it is in children's that the art of selection really becomes an art.
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When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry.
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Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.
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I wrote poetry and short stories. I would send them to magazines; they wouldn't get in. But short stories are how I found philosophy and how I'd understand the world.
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I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.
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The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.
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I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.
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Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
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I believe in solitude broken like bread by poetry.
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
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Poetry is a necessity of life.
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What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.
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The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
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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.
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My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I've had with opportunities my students aren't given and how profoundly unfair that is.
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Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.
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If poetry were nothing but texture, Dylan Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
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I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
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The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.
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Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.
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It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
