Poetry Quotes
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Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Paul Engle
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Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
John Dryden
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We need a safe place, a reserve of truth, a place where words kindle ideas and set ideas sparking off in others, a word sanctuary. Poetry is this gathering place of words.
Allison Mackie
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Superstition is the poetry of life. It is inherent in man's nature; and when we think it is wholly eradicated, it takes refuge in the strangest holes and corners, whence it peeps out all at once, as soon as it can do it with safety.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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When I am writing poetry, I try to make my mind go a little lazy, to not think too much, as a way of opening up the part of the brain that makes poems. If I'm successful in this part of the process I'm often not. If my mind gets too lazy it will linger in familiar boring territory, it's like my mind can stroke the physical world.
Dawn Lundy Martin
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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
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I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.
Ben Lerner
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If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.
Georges Simenon
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Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
David Hare
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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
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Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.
Alex Lemon
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If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.
Joseph Brodsky
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All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, "You're no good." That's all we get told all our lives. "You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler." It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, "Yeah, you're a great artist," I would have been a more secure person.
John Lennon
The Beatles
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Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so.
Izaak Walton
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I love indices! They are poetry in and of themselves, depending on the book.
Wendy C. Ortiz
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Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
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Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
Rita Dove
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When something is too beautiful or too terrible or even too funny for words, then it is time for poetry.
Eve Merriam
