Poetry Quotes: Verses to Inspire and Enchant (Page 4)

"Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it"

"I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world"

Russell Baker, Journalist

"Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it"

Russell Baker, Journalist

"You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you"

Joseph Joubert, Writer

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you"

Joseph Joubert, Writer

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words"

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before"

Audre Lorde, Poet

"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry"

Emily Dickinson, Poet

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry"

Emily Dickinson, Poet

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry"

Emily Dickinson, Poet

"When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty"

Dennis Potter, Dramatist

"When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world"

James Laughlin, Poet

"I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian"

James Laughlin, Poet

"Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important"

James Laughlin, Poet

"I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention"

James Laughlin, Poet

"I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago"

James Laughlin, Poet

"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion"

Edgar Allan Poe, Poet

"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words"

Edgar Allan Poe, Poet

"However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"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, Poet

"I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty"

Edgar Allan Poe, Poet

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry"

Edgar Allan Poe, Poet

"In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry"

Paul Muldoon, Poet

"The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives"

Paul Muldoon, Poet

"Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry"

Wislawa Szymborska, Poet

"I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again"

Wislawa Szymborska, Poet

"Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few"

John Masefield, Poet

"Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have"

John Masefield, Poet

"Dancing is the poetry of the foot"

John Dryden, Poet

"It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap"

Peter Steele, Musician

"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

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