Poetry Quotes
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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 -
When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese
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Painting is silent poetry.
Plutarch -
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 -
Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
Ben Aaronovitch -
England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
E. M. Forster -
I've been writing fiction as long as I've been writing poetry. It's just that the poetry took off, and it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write a story.
Barbara Hamby -
I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.
Jane Campion
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To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration.
William Blake -
Poetry makes people nervous. Especially in schools.
Sarah Kay -
I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.
Tommy Lee Mötley Crüe -
Take the sweet poetry of life away, and what remains behind?
William Wordsworth -
In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as logically to bar out all possibilities save one.
David Daiches -
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
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I was seized with a strong desire to write poetry, so strong, in fact, that in imagination I thought I heard a voice crying in my ears – "Write! Write". I wondered what could be the matter with me, and I began to walk backwards and forwards in a great fit of excitement, saying to myself– "I know nothing about poetry."
William Topaz McGonagall -
I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.
Gemma Files -
But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?
Joshua Slocum -
The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.
Mahatma Gandhi -
I was raised in a strict fundamentalist household, and I always say that gives you a muscle of belief. I want to believe in something, but I don't believe in what my parents believed in. Poetry has taken the place, or I think the arts have taken the place, of religion in my life. I wanted to see how that was working out through the poems.
Barbara Hamby -
One of the things called forth by the Imagist movement in poetry was neatness; and when we say keenness, we mean neatness. A knife that is keen is also a knife that cuts neatly; it isn't brutal. Sharpness is different from brutality. Brutality is clumsy: it is wide - it has a lot of fist and thumb and no delicate finger.
Eli Siegel
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Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.
Andre Naffis-Sahely -
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
David Antin -
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment...
Galway Kinnell -
The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.
Nick Laird