Poetry Quotes

"In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance."

"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."

"Poetry is meant to be heard."

"Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance."

"Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose."

"With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?"

"The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture."

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

"Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic."

"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual."

"Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan."

"Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision."

"The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both."

"I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry."

"Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it."

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me."

"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."

"I've written some poetry I don't understand myself."

"The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one."

"Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it."

"Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind."

"All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry."

"Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy."

"A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups."

"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language."

"Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it."

"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."

"In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself."

"I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry."

"Poetry is composing for the breath."

"Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding."

"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 more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all."

"And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet."

"There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory."

"My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence."

"Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world."

"Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers."

"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."

"But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me."

"But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most."

"It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose."

"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."

"I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction."

"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."

"Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners."

"The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse."

"I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry."

"I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry."