On poetry quotes:

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  • You speak As one who fed on poetry. -- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
  • In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. -- Seamus Heaney
  • I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length. -- John Ashbery
  • It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. -- Charles Baudelaire
  • I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry. -- Denise Duhamel
  • It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. -- Charles Baudelaire
  • The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry. -- Juan Felipe Herrera
  • Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings. -- Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate. -- Donald Hall
  • To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity. -- Cate Marvin
  • She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir. -- Charles Dickens
  • I don't have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry. -- Edward Hirsch
  • Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry. -- Anne Stevenson
  • When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly. -- Daniel Woodrell
  • America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry? -- Azar Nafisi
  • Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living. -- Vanessa Redgrave
  • I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were. -- Anne Stevenson
  • My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. -- Philip Levine
  • --
  • When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on. -- Carl Sandburg
  • Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. -- Vincent Van Gogh
  • Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. -- W. H. Auden
  • I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes. -- Billy Collins
  • The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth. -- Natasha Trethewey
  • I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it. -- Carol Ann Duffy
  • If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. -- Muriel Rukeyser
  • 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
  • The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry? -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on. -- Corin Nemec
  • Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person. -- Sarah Kay
  • Poetry is talking on tiptoe. -- George Meredith
  • You can't write poetry on the computer. -- Quentin Tarantino
  • Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul. -- Henrik Ibsen
  • We are surrounded by poetry on all sides... -- Vincent Van Gogh
  • May poetry and God's name have mercy on us! -- Mahmoud Darwish
  • Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics -- Gary Snyder
  • I wait on my fix:I am a poetry junkie. -- Charles Bukowski
  • Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth. -- Halldór Laxness
  • Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone. -- Nataly Kelly
  • I must say that, on the whole, I prefer fiction to poetry. -- Yuriy Tarnawsky
  • Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter. -- Marvin Bell
  • In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice. -- Li-Young Lee
  • Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day. -- Charles Dickens
  • I love indices! They are poetry in and of themselves, depending on the book. -- Wendy C. Ortiz
  • Never before had a woman put such agonizing poetry on canvas as Frida did -- Diego Rivera
  • I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. -- John Ashbery
  • Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts,or emotions -- Lisa See
  • Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin. -- Margaret Atwood
  • I like to think of poetry as statements made on the way to the grave. -- Dylan Thomas
  • Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life. -- Jean Cocteau
  • What would they say if they knew I sit for two months on six lines of poetry? -- Lorine Niedecker
  • Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. -- Carl Sandburg
  • On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel? -- Mary Oliver
  • If I could get that girl to publish her poetry, the world would change. (On Courtney Love) -- Kurt Cobain
  • American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet. -- Diane Wakoski
  • Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big ones. -- Donald Trump
  • Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose. -- C. S. Lewis
  • Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly. -- Carl Sandburg
  • [Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination. -- Jeanette Winterson
  • [On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug. -- Mark Twain
  • I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. -- PJ Harvey
  • Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. -- Terry Eagleton
  • I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system. -- Tony Harrison
  • Women like poetry. A soft word in their ears and they melt - a grease spot on the grass. -- Mary Ann Shaffer
  • Nothing fills the world quite as poetry does. A poet need not dwell on the pagecount of his life. -- D.A. Botta
  • I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords. -- Andrew Bird
  • As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry. -- Adrienne Rich
  • I call my style, "Poetry in Motion." So I'm working on a new art to make fighting even more beautiful. -- Bobby Green
  • Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry. -- John Hegley
  • The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue. -- William Cowper
  • Since the dawn of time, primitive humans thought, loved and had poetry. They also pooped on everything. It was horrible. -- Dana Gould
  • Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships. -- Antonin Artaud
  • I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you'd expect, huh? -- Suzi Quatro
  • Winter's notion of poetry is tragedy. It knows nothing of comedy. Its laughter was frozen on its lips long ago. -- William Alfred Quayle
  • Poetry depends on being simultaneously opaque and transparent. It can't be only one or the other. The pebble and the pool. -- Peter J. Daniels
  • We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. -- John Steinbeck
  • The pilgrim is a poetic traveler, one who believes that there is poetry on the road, at the heart of everything. -- Phil Cousineau
  • Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry. -- Robert Morgan
  • What I try to do is to keep emotion on a tight leash; otherwise, it can never be transubstantiated into poetry. -- Kiki Dimoula
  • I wrote a lot of poetry that was based on stories of the sea and I was really inspired by that. -- Ellie Goulding
  • I feel in poetry there aren't that many rules that you need to absolutely live by depending on your style of poetry. -- Masiela Lusha
  • Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own. -- Naomi Shihab Nye
  • It's poetry to watch the game when the game is left alone, when there's not a bunch of flags on the ground. -- Ray Lewis
  • Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep. -- Laura Riding
  • I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it. -- Callan McAuliffe
  • Music straightjackets a poem and prevents it from breathing on its own, whereas it liberates a lyric. Poetry doesn't need music; lyrics do. -- Stephen Sondheim
  • Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't. -- K.J. Parker
  • Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas. -- Aaron Belz
  • As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics. -- Kathleen Rooney
  • Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever, makes justice in the world. That's why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog. -- Grace Paley
  • On the meridian of time, there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. -- Henry Miller
  • After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat. -- Osbert Sitwell
  • A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters -- Julio Cortazar
  • Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job. -- Toi Derricotte
  • Poetry is a kind of gasp, and there it is, a spark on the page. Fiction, on the other hand, is like swamp fire. -- Joy Kogawa
  • La poe sie veutquelque chose d'e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage. -- Denis Diderot
  • My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did. -- Dylan Walsh
  • Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it. -- Jeremy Bentham
  • I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn. -- Edward Hirsch
  • I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry. -- Conrad Aiken
  • Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry. -- Marisha Pessl
  • I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose. -- Theodora Goss
  • You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good. -- Dorianne Laux
  • Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface. -- Osip Mandelstam
  • I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way. -- Carol Ann Duffy
  • I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. -- Paul Dirac
  • You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart. -- Carol Ann Duffy
  • When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love. -- Umberto Eco
  • My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands. -- Bob Dylan
  • Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by. -- Mahmoud Darwish
  • You put yourself in the receptive frame of mind with which we approach music or poetry, which you can measure the difference on a neurological scanner. -- Karen Armstrong
  • Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you. -- Billy Collins
  • I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world. -- James Laughlin
  • I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world. -- Russell Baker
  • 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. -- Patrick White
  • People go on quarrelling and fancying this and that, and thinking that the world is full of romance and poetry. When they get married they know better. -- Anthony Trollope
  • I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant. -- Joanne Harris
  • Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks. -- Ed Koch
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