Poetry Quotes

"Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully"

William C. Bryant, Poet

"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language"

Steven Pinker, Scientist

"Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation"

Robert Fitzgerald, Author

"Eloquence is the poetry of prose"

William C. Bryant, Poet

"It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope"

Tom Hanks, Actor

"An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence"

Raymond Chandler, Writer

"I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry"

John Cage, Composer

"She was the Judy Garland of American poetry"

James Dickey, Novelist

"As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper"

Goldwin Smith, Historian

"I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge"

Jeffery Deaver, Writer

"But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet"

Jeffery Deaver, Writer

"Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations"

Horace Walpole, Author

"If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act"

A. E. Housman, Poet

"There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago"

Allen Tate, Poet

"Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

"When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images"

Niels Bohr, Physicist

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea"

John Updike, Novelist

"Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it"

Walter Pater, Critic

"I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity"

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet

"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, Critic

"For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history"

Tahar Ben Jelloun, Poet

"Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of"

Tom Holt, Novelist

"I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life"

Saul Williams, Musician

"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"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, Soldier

"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, Soldier

"Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world"

Archibald MacLeish, Poet

"In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry"

Danielle Steel, Novelist

"That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact"

Walter Pater, Critic

"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, Critic

"The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Journalist

"Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique"

Karl Shapiro, Poet

"Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words"

Archibald MacLeish, Poet

"Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall"

Ani DiFranco, Musician

"I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation"

Trevor Dunn, Musician

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