Poetry Quotes
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The more we know about this universe, the more mysterious it is. The old world that Job knew was marvelous enough, and his description of its wonders is among the noblest poetry of the race, but today the new science has opened to our eyes vistas of mystery that transcend in their inexplicable marvel anything the ancients ever dreamed.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
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I was born in New Orleans, but I grew up in Hawaii. That was a paradise. That's a paradise I keep inside of me all the time. It's funny, I don't really write too much in poetry about Hawaii, but I published a book of stories a couple of years ago.
Barbara Hamby
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Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.
David Biespiel
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To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—
Emily Dickinson
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Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.
William Ellery Channing
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Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.
Georges Seurat
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
Ezra Pound
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The works have to look like they're confident. But they also have to look sort of troubled. It's this weird thing: "Does that look confident and troubled?" It's a bit like difficult poetry.
Amy Sillman
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Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.
Stevie Smith
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If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?
Emily Dickinson
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My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem. ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden.
Sara Teasdale
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People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence, what's blunt and has clarity.
Elia Suleiman
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I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.
Alice Oswald
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Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost.
Hans Arp
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Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.
Asghar Farhadi
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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
