Poetry Quotes
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Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?
Honore de Balzac
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Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
Umberto Eco
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Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
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Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.
Ellen Bass
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Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
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If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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Not too many people know it, but when I was in junior high, I was a pretty tough kid and was the leader of a street gang. Well, OK, it was less a street gang than an Ecology Club. We were pretty intimidating, though, and had our own meeting room until we got run out of there by a bunch of thugs from the Poetry Society.
W. Bruce Cameron
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I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.
F. Sionil Jose
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I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering.
Yusef Komunyakaa
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My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
Kate Thompson
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My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Tao Lin
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I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.
Jack Gleeson
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When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
T. S. Eliot
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Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong; They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
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I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
A. R. Ammons
