Poetry Quotes

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

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

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

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

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.

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

I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

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.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

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.

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.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

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.

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

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.