Poetry Quotes
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I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
Maya Angelou
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Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
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I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.
Natasha Trethewey
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
Adrian McKinty
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I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
Natasha Trethewey
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We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark, and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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There were three great Virginia poets in the very beginning - George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson. 'What!' you say. 'We do not even know the names of their publishers. They were not poets!' Well, how do you know? Did you ever really read them? What do you know about it? Their very names will breathe poetry forever.
Vachel Lindsay
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I read a lot of poetry, and I love what it does with language. I love music, too, and I think there's probably no coincidence there, that the rhythm of the words is almost as important as the words themselves, and when you can get the two working together, which usually takes me about 20 goes, I feel a huge satisfaction.
Kate Grenville
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A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.
Chloe Zhao
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Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short.
Irving Howe
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The crown of literature is poetry.
W. Somerset Maugham
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Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
Walter Jon Williams
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I originally went to school for writing, for non-fiction. I'm specifically a poetry major within literature, but I don't know.
Paloma Elsesser
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That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.
Galway Kinnell
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My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.
Marina Tsvetaeva
