Poetry Quotes
-
I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.
Jennifer McMahon
-
Rhyme and metre are artificial and an external addition to poetry.
F.S. Flint
-
I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.
Alex Flinn
-
As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling.
Bernard Herrmann
-
Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
James Fenton
-
There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
Anthony Hecht
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Hello my Country I once came to tell everyone your story Your passion was my poetry And your past my most potent glory Your promise was my prayer Your hypocrisy my nightmare And your problems fill my present Are we both going somewhere?
Harry Chapin
-
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
-
The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. Poetry still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy.
Blake Morrison
-
There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.
Thomas Carlyle
-
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
-
Poetry, for me, conveys the essence of narrative rather than its particulars.
Delia Sherman
-
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
-
Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.
Edmund Blunden
