The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
I like poems that are little games.
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.
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.
In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
I think I’m a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I’m not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn’t work and why.
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I’m not kidding.
We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order – poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Poetry allies itself with beauty – a supreme union – but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.
What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
That’s all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction – I don’t think anyone could know how much it really means.
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read – Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier – were rhyme poets. That’s what captured me.
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.
There’s a reason poets often say, ‘Poetry saved my life,’ for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul’s suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
They need to learn poetry. They don’t need to learn about poetry. They don’t need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don’t need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
It’s always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, just a of questions that I don’t hear other artists asking.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
There are Behan experts in international universities, but we seem to have forgotten him here in Ireland. He was an extraordinarily gifted writer. His poetry alone is outstanding.
The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
One: whose shoulders do you stand on? And two: what do you stand for? These are two questions that I always begin my poetry workshops with students because at times, poetry can seem like this dead art form for old white men who just seem like they were born to be old, like, you know, Benjamin Button or something.
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.
I’m a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn’t matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They’re the same if you reach the beauty.
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.
Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.
There is a great deal of freshness and charm in ‘400 Blows.’ There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut’s camera looks at his beloved city.
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Some people ask, ‘How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?’ I say, ‘My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.’