Top 34 Best English Poetry Quotes
#1. 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.
Peter Porter
#2. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.
Lara Pulver
#3. Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.
Helen Keller
#4. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#5. My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Herschel Walker
#6. I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
Langston Hughes
#7. It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.
Alexander McCall Smith
#8. English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
James Fenton
#9. I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.
Michael Donaghy
#10. As for poetry 'belonging' in the classroom, it's like the way they taught us sex in those old hygiene classes: not performance but semiotics. If it I had taken Hygiene 71 seriously, I would have become a monk; & if I had taken college English seriously, I would have become an accountant.
Jerome Rothenberg
#11. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#12. 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.
Lafcadio Hearn
#13. The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare's day.
Mark Lamonica
#14. I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.
John Donne
#15. I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
Gloria Estefan
#16. When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.
Pat Mora
#17. In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag.
Jean-Christophe Valtat
#18. Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.
George Edward Woodberry
#19. What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
Stephen Greenblatt
#20. Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.
Maurice Druon
#21. I never had much education in English poetry as such.
Anne Carson
#22. By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.
Max Beerbohm
#25. I've always had a fondness for language ... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word ... and the sung word.
Joel Plaskett
#26. The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
#27. You have already achieved the English-Language poet's most important goal: you can read, Write and speak English well enough to understand this sentence.
Stephen Fry
#28. When it came to a lot of these German actors with the English, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't get the poetry out of it. They couldn't own it and make it their own. And they were struggling with it. And then, Christoph [Waltz] came in and I didn't know who Christoph was.
Quentin Tarantino
#29. Khusrau darya prem ka, ulti wa ki dhaar,
Jo utra so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar.
English Translation.
Oh Khusrau, the river of love
Runs in strange directions.
One who jumps into it drowns,
And one who drowns, gets across.
Amir Khusrau
#30. I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
Gordon Getty
#31. In English, we were still on the Introduction to Poetry Unit, and I'm not lying, if I ever meet Percy Bysshe Shelley walking down the streets of Marysville, I'm going to punch him right in the face.
Gary D. Schmidt
#32. I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Diane Wakoski
#33. I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.
Robert Graves
#34. I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
Sally Kirkland