Poetry Quotes
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
Will Durant
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I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
Norman MacCaig
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We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.
Thomas Carlyle
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The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.
John Ruskin
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I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.
Paul Engle
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I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
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At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
Satyajit Ray
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And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound
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How they had dreamed together, he and she... how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived for a while in the very heart of poetry.
Elizabeth von Arnim
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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
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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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For though, in nature, depth and height
Are equally held infinite:
In poetry, the height we know;
'Tis only infinite below.
Jonathan Swift
