Famous Quotes

"They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it."

Peter Davison on Poetry

More quotes about Poetry

• "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

  T. S. Eliot on Poetry

• "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

• "A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

More quotes by Peter Davison

• "I like poems that are little games."

• "My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence."

• "I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry."

• "Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world."

• "Poetry is composing for the breath."