Poetry Quotes
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I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
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In the world of British poetry, Carol Ann Duffy is a superstar.
Katharine Viner
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Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
David Lehman
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When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker
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I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.
Anne Stevenson
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Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
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We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.
Patti Smith
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Good religious poetry... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.
A. E. Housman
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One cannot build life from refrigerators, politics, credit statements and crossword puzzles. That is impossible. Nor can one exist for any length of time without poetry, without color, without love.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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True poetry, like the religious prompting itself, springs from the emotional side of a man's complex nature, and is ever in harmony with his highest intuitions and aspirations.
Epes Sargent
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Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.
Ivan Turgenev
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In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.
Gene Luen Yang
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I'll never be a poet,' said Amory as he finished. 'I'm not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don't catch the subtle things like 'silver-snarling trumpets.' I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never right anything but mediocre poetry.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.
Georges Bataille
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When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
Sigmund Freud
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The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice.
Earle Birney
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Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.
Lisel Mueller
