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I'm not a great poetry fan. -- Rupert Everett
You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry. -- Felix Dennis
The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence. -- Laura Marling
Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate. -- James Fenton
All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ... -- Edith Sitwell
The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. -- David Whyte
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. -- Stephen Spender
... what is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death? -- Erica Jong
What raises great poetry above all else--it is the entire person and also the entire world. -- Franz Grillparzer
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. -- Robinson Jeffers
A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire. -- Kenneth Clark
Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II? -- Edward Abbey
Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture. -- Dana Gioia
As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death." -- Andrew Davies
Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer. -- Jean Houston
There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it. -- Richard Livingstone
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. -- Milan Kundera
Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth. -- Hugh Miller
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that. -- Diane Wakoski
Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others. -- Bryant McGill
Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man. -- Don DeLillo
Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart. -- Helen Keller
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. -- Robert Morgan
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. -- Eugenio Montale
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose. -- Jerry B. Jenkins
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams. -- Gaston Bachelard
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry. -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends. -- David Whyte
Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it. -- Witold Gombrowicz
Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles. -- Anthony Burgess
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life. -- Lascelles Abercrombie
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose. -- Walter Savage Landor
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does. -- Robert Morgan
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul. -- Eugenio Montale
That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were. -- Paul Muldoon
Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did. -- Sarah Kay
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young. -- Lady Gregory
I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written. -- Saul Williams
The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy. -- Joseph Alexander Leighton
Poetry is the morning dream of great minds. -- Alphonse de Lamartine
... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. -- Adrienne Rich
There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness. -- Marianne Moore
Refine your senses through the great masters of music, painting, and poetry. -- Ernst Haas
A merely great intellect can produce prose, but not poetry, not one line. -- Edward Thomas
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry. -- Edward Hirsch
Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls. -- Voltaire
Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry. -- D.T. Suzuki
Life has sadness, joy, beauty, like poetry.So be passionate and write a great story. -- Debasish Mridha
I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet. -- Francois Mauriac
Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry. -- Khaled Hosseini
Through all permutations and youthful poetry, I came to believe that the film actor was the great "literateur" of his time. -- Jack Nicholson
The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists. -- Robert Hass
In the great cities, winter glitters with art and feasting. But poetry, the country cousin, sees only the dearth of the fields. -- Mason Cooley
History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same. -- A. L. Rowse
Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare. -- Victor Hugo
Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely. -- David McCullough
If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry -- Thomas Cole
This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul." -- Eugenio Montale
If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best. -- Donald Hall
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution. -- Seamus Heaney
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. -- John Keats
Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry. -- Chad Harbach
That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were -- Paul Muldoon
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering. -- Anne Lamott
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. -- Mark Strand
When trying to explain anything, I usually find that the Bible, that great collection of magnificent and varied poetry, has said it before in the best possible way. -- Amy Lowell
I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it. -- Allen Tate
I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured. -- Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

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