Poetry Quotes
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O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause,
Being for a woman's sake.
William Butler Yeats
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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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Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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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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I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.
Kathleen Norris
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For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud--and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule--that everything that exists in nature exists in art.
Victor Hugo
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Sholeh Wolpé poetry proves to be rumination, prayer, song.
Nathalie Handal
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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… 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. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Ben Lerner
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Poetry had everything to teach me about life.
Diane Ackerman
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American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
David Biespiel
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But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?
Joshua Slocum
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This artistic uprising we had the other night in Washington Square park: there was poetry, there was dance, there was song, there was spoken word; and people left feeling so inspired and so energised. We have to get ourselves out of this syndrome of trauma and being re-traumatised. Art releases this energy. It exposes us to wonder again, and magic again, and ambiguity - all the things we need to really keep going and fighting and resisting in these times.
Eve Ensler
