For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.
Poetry is its own medium; it’s very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
Don’t call my lyrics poetry. It’s an insult to real poets.
Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.
Superstition is the poetry of life.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
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.
Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
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.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
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.
I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.
I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.
We don’t attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.
Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism – how should poetry escape?
If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don’t want our lives to end.
If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there – not because you’ve done a comedy performance but because you’re talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it’s Whitman, who lost his job for ‘Leaves of Grass,’ or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose ‘Howl’ was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you’re going to put yourself in jeopardy.
And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
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.
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
‘Blue Velvet’ changed my life forever. It was like I’d always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn’t been reached before.
Poetry is life distilled.
Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.
I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can’t teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
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.
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
You don’t help people in your poems. I’ve been trying to help people all my life – that’s my trouble.
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person’s earth lives.
You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there’s a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there’s so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn’t read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
Children can write poetry and then, unless they’re poets, they stop when reach puberty.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Children seem naturally drawn to poetry – it’s some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
I’ve always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
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.
Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.
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.
Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.
When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.
