Poetry Quotes

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote"

"Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture"

Rita Dove, Poet

"I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests"

Pablo Neruda, Writer

"Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems"

John Barton, Poet

"The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers"

Lewis Thomas, Scientist

"And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious"

John C. Ransom

"Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry"

John Andrew Holmes, Journalist

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash"

Leonard Cohen, Musician

"The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry"

Philip Levine, Poet

"The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think"

June Jordan, Writer

"I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country"

Will Cuppy, Writer

"I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding"

Rita Dove, Poet

"On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton"

Richard Serra, Sculptor

"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking"

Malcolm Wilson, Politician

"Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases"

William Shenstone, Poet

"Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home"

Philip Levine, Poet

"Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice"

Philip Levine, Poet

"I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on"

Isaac Rosenberg, Poet

"There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn"

Lawrence Summers, Economist

"I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano"

Gordon Getty, Businessman

"Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture"

Juan Ramon Jimenez, Poet

"Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind"

Thomas B. Macaulay, Historian

"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines"

Thomas B. Macaulay, Historian

"Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth"

June Jordan, Writer

"We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine"

Jack Prelutsky, Poet

"Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves"

Jack Prelutsky, Poet

"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all"

Wallace Stevens, Poet

"I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went"

Paul Auster, Author

"Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom"

Wallace Stevens, Poet

"Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers"

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Poet

"The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something"

Rita Dove, Poet

"I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age"

Rita Dove, Poet

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful"

Rita Dove, Poet

"Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry"

Thurston Moore, Musician

"There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas"

Robert Adamson, Philosopher

"Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life"

William R. Benet

"Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science"

Walter Jon Williams, Writer

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