Poetry Quotes
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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.
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Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
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Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
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People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.
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I used to say to my auntie, 'You throw my fu*kin' poetry out, and you'll regret it when I'm famous,' and she threw the bast*rd stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fu*kin' genius or whatever I was when I was a child.
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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.
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If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.
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With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.
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Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
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That warmth's the very stuff of poesy.
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When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
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To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie— True Poems flee—
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... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
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Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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Black Poets should live--not leap From steel bridges, like the white boys do.
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Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
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There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
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A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
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Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
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Poetry: the best words in the best order.
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In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs.
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Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.
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In poetry you can leave out everything but the truth.
