Poetry Quotes

"For me, prose walks, poetry dances"

"Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world"

Richard Eberhart, Poet

"When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you"

Story Musgrave, Astronaut

"But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality"

Mark Strand, Poet

"I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream"

Mark Strand, Poet

"While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song"

David Antin, Poet

"I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not"

Kenneth Koch, Poet

"The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself"

Laura Riding, Poet

"Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go"

Laura Riding, Poet

"I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose"

Shelby Foote, Author

"I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time"

Robert Hass, Poet

"Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry"

Salvatore Quasimodo, Author

"I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry"

Rick Springfield, Musician

"I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry"

Lafcadio Hearn, Author

"As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry"

Kenneth Koch, Poet

"Poetry is life distilled"

Gwendolyn Brooks, Poet

"I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits"

J. Carter Brown

"Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life"

John Betjeman, Poet

"Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid"

Salvatore Quasimodo, Author

"I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world"

Kenneth Koch, Poet

"I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry"

Randall Jarrell, Poet

"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, Cartoonist

"Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing"

W. S. Merwin, Poet

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own"

Salvatore Quasimodo, Author

"So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday"

Aaron Neville, Musician

"I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting"

Janine Turner, Actress

"I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories"

Bobby McFerrin, Musician

"Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself"

James Schuyler, Poet

"I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on"

Corin Nemec, Actor

"I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry"

A. R. Ammons, Poet

"There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library"

Anthony Hecht, Poet

"That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends"

A. R. Ammons, Poet

"Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values"

A. R. Ammons, Poet

"Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition"

A. R. Ammons, Poet

"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others"

Antonin Artaud, Dramatist

"Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training"

David Hunt, Politician

"I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well"

Annie Lennox, Musician

"Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew"

Anthony Hecht, Poet

"The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance"

A. R. Ammons, Poet

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