Poetry Quotes
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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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For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.
Orson F. Whitney
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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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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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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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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 wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
J. Milton Hayes
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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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Money is a kind of poetry.
Wallace Stevens
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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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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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Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
Oscar Wilde
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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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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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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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It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.
Samantha Morton
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I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.
Natasha Trethewey
