Poetry Quotes
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Ornate rhetoric thought out of the rule of Plato... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.
John Milton
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Poetry either pulses with real life or it's just an aborted simulacra. There's no middle ground.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.
Judith Wright
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In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
John Barton
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.
Ben Lerner
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In most of the world, poetry has such a different reputation than it does in Western culture.
Eliza Griswold
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One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964.
Peter Coyote
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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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We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.
Brian D. McLaren
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The songs we sing invite the participation of the listener, who is central to finding a way of creating the life of the song at that listening. It's the difference between poetry and didactic writing. One tells you, 'This is it,' and the other says, 'Let's find this together.'
Peter Yarrow
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Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.
Charles Dickens
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Writing dark poetry was always my escape.
Bishop Briggs
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Many people have complained that Imagined Communities is a difficult book and especially difficult to translate. The accusation is partly true. But a great deal of the difficulty lies not in the realm of ideas, but in its original polemical stance and its intended audience: the UK intelligentsia. This is why the book contains so many quotations from and allusions to, English poetry, essays, histories, legends, etc., that do not have to be explained to English readers, but which are likely to be unfamiliar to others.
Benedict Anderson
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You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.
Van Morrison
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Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos.
I. A. Richards
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Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.
Wes Nisker
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I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I could write songs. I discouraged myself and thought it was so hard. But starting this process and learning just what it is to be a songwriter and performer taught me that you don't have to feel discouraged about anything.
Alessia Cara
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Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption.
Nancy Springer
