Poetry Quotes
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My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Tao Lin
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When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Denis Diderot
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Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
Mary Oliver
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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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I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.
Cheryl Mendelson
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My first book was an adult novel, 'Down Among the Gods,' published by Virago, and I've written poems as well, a slim volume of poetry.
Kate Thompson
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It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.
Orson F. Whitney
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I never really had them. I always get the eccentric kids who dress funny and sit and write poetry for three months in their bedrooms......I was going to see tons of shows when I was a teenager, so if I was a girl, would that have made me a groupie? If I wanted to shake Thurston Moore's hand or something?
Beck
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I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
Gabrielle Aplin
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I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.
Robert Frost
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I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.
Oscar Hijuelos
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It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
Peter Davison
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Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
Walter Pater
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A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Walter Pater
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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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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden
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It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.
Samantha Morton
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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
William Butler Yeats
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O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman's gaze.
William Butler Yeats
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If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
Gary Hume
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I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
Daniel Radcliffe
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For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
