Famous Quotes
- 'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
- Andre Gide on Poetry
- A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
- Chaim Potok on Poetry
- A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.
- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel on Poetry
- A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
- Jose Marti on Poetry
- A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
- Mark Strand on Poetry
- A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.
- Lisa Bonet on Poetry
- A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
- Mark Strand on Poetry
- A lot happens by accident in poetry.
- Howard Nemerov on Poetry
- A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.
- Brit Marling on Poetry
- A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.
- John Drinkwater on Poetry
- A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
- Lord Byron on Poetry
- A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
- Robert Frost on Poetry
- A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
- Douglas Dunn on Poetry
- A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.
- Thomas Harrison on Poetry
- A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
- Robert Morgan on Poetry
- A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery on Poetry
- A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
- E. M. Forster on Poetry
- A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
- Anne Stevenson on Poetry
- A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
- Oscar Wilde on Poetry
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
- W. H. Auden on Poetry
- A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
- Wallace Stevens on Poetry
- A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko on Poetry
- A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
- Salman Rushdie on Poetry
- A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
- Seamus Heaney on Poetry
- A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.
- Karen Armstrong on Poetry
- A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
- Jean Cocteau on Poetry
- A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
- W. H. Auden on Poetry
- 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 on Poetry
- Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
- Robert Morgan on Poetry
- All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
- Oscar Wilde on Poetry
- All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
- Alfred Douglas on Poetry
- All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.
- All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
- Gustave Flaubert on Poetry
- All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
- Stevie Smith on Poetry
- All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
- Edgar Allan Poe on Poetry
- All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton on Poetry
- All the modern verse plays, they're terrible they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.
- Denis Johnson on Poetry
- All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.
- Norman MacCaig on Poetry
- Always be a poet, even in prose.
- Charles Baudelaire on Poetry
- America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?
- Azar Nafisi on Poetry
- American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
- Diane Wakoski on Poetry
- Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
- Robert Morgan on Poetry
- An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
- Raymond Chandler on Poetry
- An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
- John Barton on Poetry
- And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
- Mark Strand on Poetry
- And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
- John C. Ransom on Poetry
- And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.
- Julianna Baggott on Poetry
- And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
- Norman MacCaig on Poetry
- And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
- Hart Crane on Poetry
- And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
- Lynn Johnston on Poetry
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