Poetry Quotes
-
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
-
They snatched that from me which I still held. They vied with each other in reading poetry to me in sheltered corners. They hung on my words, and laughed appreciatively every time I opened my mouth—sometimes even before I had opened it, which is conduct that easily dries up the springs of conversation. Such young men do exist, and it is a pity, because they are so bad for the older women, who give heed to their flutings at their own peril. I daresay they would have been bad for me too if I had taken them seriously, but I wasn’t quite old enough to do that, and my sole reaction to their devotion was that I was irked.
Elizabeth von Arnim
-
I write poetry to figure things out. It's what I use as a navigating tool in my life, so when there's something that I just can't understand, I have to "poem" my way through it. For that reason I write a lot about family, because my family confuses me and I'm always trying to figure them out. I write a lot about love, because love is continually confusing in all of its many glorious aspects.
Sarah Kay
-
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
Joseph Brodsky
-
You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
Theodore Roethke
-
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
-
When I rap, I get to express myself in a way where putting words together is like poetry, and sometimes it's better to talk in certain expressions than sing, you know? So I love, I love to rhyme when I want to express certain things.
Wyclef Jean
Fugees
-
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.
Joseph Brodsky
-
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
Paul Muldoon
-
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
John Drinkwater
-
If you want to understand poetry,
You have to go to its origin,
If you want to understand the poet,
You have to go to the Poet's home.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
In most of the world, poetry has such a different reputation than it does in Western culture. Poetry is a popular genre in Afghanistan. If you turned on the radio, there would be a poetry program that would be as popular as The Real Housewives. People aren't listening to poetry as if they're taking their vitamins. Instead, it's a popular vessel you can fill with anything. You could fill it with sass. You could fill it with rage. You could fill it with political statements.
Eliza Griswold
-
The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.
William Cowper
-
That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech.
Lord Byron
-
American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
David Biespiel
-
There is much poetry for which most of us do not care, but with a little trouble when we are young we may find one or two poets whose poetry, if we get to know it well, will mean very much to us and become part of ourselves... The love for such poetry which comes to us when we are young will not disappear as we get older; it will remain in us, becoming an intimate part of our own being, and will be an assured source of strength, consolation, and delight.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon