Poetry Quotes
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Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.
Austin Clarke
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In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery
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I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there’s no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
David Biespiel
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Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.
Austin Clarke
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Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.
Lincoln Kirstein
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There are several more careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one's birth, the conduct of one's parents, the current economic structure of society, and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary.
Hart Crane
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For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. Perhaps we reveal ourselves too much in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal. The tiny incidents of daily rouitine are as much a commentary of racial ideas as the highest flight of philosophy or poetry.
Okakura Kakuzo
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Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
Eileen Myles
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There is no end to grief. Nor no end to poetry.
Babette Deutsch
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I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
Stephen Malkmus
Pavement
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So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.
e. e. cummings
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I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
Anthony Hopkins
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The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
John Drane
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The fundamental values of a true community are elsewhere: in love, poetry, disinterested thought, the free use of the imagination, the pursuit of non-utilitarian activities, the production of non-profitmaking goods, the employment of non-consumable wealth - here are the sustaining values of a living culture.
Lewis Mumford
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Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
Hannah Arendt
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I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.
P. G. Wodehouse
