Poetry Quotes
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Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!
Roberto Benigni
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Poetry alone cannot change the material conditions of an unjust society, but I challenge anyone to name a substantive freedom movement that does not have poetry.
Aja Monet
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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.
Edouard Glissant
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When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John F. Kennedy
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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman's face, or worse--
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil.
William Butler Yeats
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Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell
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Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting
Edouard Vuillard
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I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.
Stevie Smith
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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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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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Poetry in love is no more to be avoided than jealousy.
William Wycherley
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All of the arts are kin - music and sculpture and dance, those are wordless art forms. But poetry is defined by language. Of course, each art is distinct, and has its own character - not just in terms of media, but in terms of what seems to lie at the heart of it.
Campbell McGrath
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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.
W. H. Auden
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I use poetry to help me work through what I don’t understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I’ve been.
Sarah Kay
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When I am writing poetry, I try to make my mind go a little lazy, to not think too much, as a way of opening up the part of the brain that makes poems. If I'm successful in this part of the process I'm often not. If my mind gets too lazy it will linger in familiar boring territory, it's like my mind can stroke the physical world.
Dawn Lundy Martin
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The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
Colm Toibin
