Poetry Quotes
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I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
Taslima Nasrin -
'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.
Joe Wright
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I wrote a lot of poetry that was based on stories of the sea and I was really inspired by that.
Ellie Goulding -
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
Lascelles Abercrombie -
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
Lafcadio Hearn -
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats -
Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.
Will Durant -
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Edmund Burke
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Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.
Bernie Taupin -
If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
Gary Hume -
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch -
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
Lafcadio Hearn -
I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
Abraham Verghese -
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
T. S. Eliot
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As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
N. Scott Momaday -
Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
Donald Hall -
Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.
Colin Wilson -
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
Omari Hardwick -
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Denis Diderot -
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
Franz Grillparzer
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I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
Adrian McKinty -
The kinds of things that poetry can offer are timeless - mainly the kind of compression it offers of powerful language, powerful feelings and images, and, you know, the inner experience becoming outer.
Brenda Hillman -
I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I've heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who's good and who's not. It's like the word 'lyrical' - 'lyrical' is the worst word in the entire world.
Thebe Neruda Kgositsile -
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
Natasha Trethewey