Poetry Quotes

I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.

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

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

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

Every single soul is a poem.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

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.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

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.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.