Poetry Quotes
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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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When something is too beautiful or too terrible or even too funny for words, then it is time for poetry.
Eve Merriam
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Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.
Josephine Hart
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Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
Lord Byron
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I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
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A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim Potok
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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
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I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.
Gemma Files
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When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.
Ana Castillo
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I still believe in the need for guitars and drums and desperate poetry.
Frank Turner
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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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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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Life is short - while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral - indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving, the phrase applied to it - the philosophy of the garden.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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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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On the one hand poetry is useless. It can't change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence. It came into the world when humans did. It's what makes human beings human.
Bei Dao
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There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.
Umberto Boccioni
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Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
Donald Hall
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For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
John Drinkwater
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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
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Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.
Octavio Paz
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Poetry is a quality of the artistic expression independent of form.
F.S. Flint
