Poetry Quotes

"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."

"And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written."

"And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem."

"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."

"Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture."

"There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry."

"High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this."

"Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do."

"I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry."

"Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins."

"I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers."

"I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets."

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

"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."

"I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony."

"I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes."

"A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art."

"I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry."

"Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early."

"I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age."

"I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding."

"The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something."

"Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild."

"You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you."

"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."

"In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well."

"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."

"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."

"Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine."

"One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry."

"Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher."

"Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter."

"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."

"France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic."

"Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry."

"Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen."

"A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named."

"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?"

"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."

"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

"Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture."

"The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch."

"If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry."

"Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it."

"The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also."

"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas."