Poetry Quotes
In the past things were either in your head (subjective, imaginary, fantasy) or else they were part of the outside world - cold, hard, concrete materialistic reality. If you want to look at it in terms of poetry, there was surrealism and objectivism. Now there's the veil of the virtual in between. The old opposition between inner and outer doesn't quite capture it, especially as it contains elements of both. It's real but not concrete.
Elaine Equi
You can publish a poem you think is a very important poem, and you don't hear a word from anyone. You can publish a book of poetry by dropping it off a cliff and waiting to hear an echo. Quite often, you'll never hear a thing. So doing that, using older work, puts it in a context, and that sort of forces the reader to realize what its importance is-if it has any. Everything needs a context. You're not going to recognize a poet unless you have a context.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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.
Dee Rees
I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.
Derek Walcott
The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice.
Earle Birney
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
James Fenton
One learned gentleman, "a sage grave man," Talk'd of the Ghost in Hamlet, "sheath'd in steel"— His well-read friend, who next to speak began, Said, "That was poetry, and nothing real;" A third, of more extensive learning, ran To Sir George Villiers' Ghost, and Mrs. Veal; Of sheeted Spectres spoke with shorten'd breath, And thrice he quoted Drelincourt on Death.
Bill Vaughan
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
When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.
M. Ward
Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.
Eileen Myles
Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.
David Hunt
I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
Anthony Hopkins
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
I think that a good deal of poetry and art gives us some sense of access to another's voice, perception, texture of thought, imagination. Sometimes it gives us better access to the strangeness in ourselves.
Mary Szybist
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
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah's 'Black Reign' is the album that stands out the most.
Jason Reynolds
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
Brooks Atkinson
Poetry is a necessity of life.
C.D. Wright
