Poetry Quotes
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I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'
Jill Scott
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The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.
Saul Bellow
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Poetry should only occupy the idle.
Lord Byron
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The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.
Caroline Kennedy
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If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
John Barton
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There is a great difference, whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general or sees the general in the particular. From the former procedure there ensues allegory, in which the particular serves only as illustration, as example of the general. The latter procedure, however, is genuinely the nature of poetry; it expresses something particular, without thinking of the general or pointing to it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.
E. M. Forster
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In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.
Hermann Hesse
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There is no end to grief. Nor no end to poetry.
Babette Deutsch
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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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Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
James Fenton
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Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
James Joyce
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The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.
Sean O'Faolain
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I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
Jim Jarmusch
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I didn't go out on one date in high school. I played guitar and sang and wrote my own music and poetry and stuff when I was a teenager.
Kathy Bates
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Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
Luis Alberto Urrea
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The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
Lynda Barry
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Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.
Charles Dickens
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Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.
E. A. Bucchianeri
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Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band, because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.
Thurston Moore
Sonic Youth
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The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
Matthew Arnold
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One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
John Updike
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I still believe in the need for guitars and drums and desperate poetry.
Frank Turner
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For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.
Peter Greenaway