Poetry Quotes
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I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.
Caroline Kennedy
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In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.
Paul Heyse
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Poetry is a quality of the artistic expression independent of form.
F.S. Flint
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I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
Anthony Hopkins
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All that remains to poets is honest poetry.
Umberto Saba
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I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
Anne Stevenson
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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.
Brad Leithauser
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The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Passing that fiery tree – if only she could; Be making love, Be making poetry, Be exploding, be speeding through the universe; Like a photon, like a shower; Of yellow blazes...
Alicia Ostriker
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
Honore de Balzac
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When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
Billy Collins
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Poetry is a necessity of life.
C.D. Wright
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The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.
Nick Laird
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Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.
Robert Frost
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... the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.
Bliss Perry
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Theodore Roethke