Poetry Quotes
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I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best served by these things.
John Fuller
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We believe we can also show that words do not have exactly the same psychic "weight" depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or to the language of daylight life-to rested language or language under surveillance-to the language of natural poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.
Gaston Bachelard
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I am inclined to believe that some music, like certain poetry, finds its appeal and way to all.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
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Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.
Franz Wright
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If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.
Eileen Myles
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If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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To be honest, I wasn't crazy about the kind of poetry I found in high school English books. I didn't get really excited about poetry until I discovered Lorca in college. If it wasn't for surrealism, I'm not sure I'd have become so involved in poetry. I was attracted by the extravagant imagery and elements of fantasy. This was in the '70s and it seemed to fit the psychedelic mood of the times. I found it liberating.
Elaine Equi
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I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.
Jessica Steen
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Consistent poetry is made of letters. Letters have no idea. Letters as such have no sound, they offer only tonal possibilities, to be valuated by the performer. The consistent poem weighs the value of both letters and groups.
Kurt Schwitters
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don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.
Lucille Clifton
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In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
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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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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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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Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
