Top 70 English Poetry Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English wit ... But though it is full of good sense and humanity, it is not transcendent poetry.For picturesque description of persons it is, perhaps, without a parallel in English poetry; yet it is essentially humorous, as the loftiest genius never is.
Henry David Thoreau
#4. The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
James Fenton
#5. Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
George Orwell
#6. A man's most vivid emotional and sensuous experience is inevitably bound up with the language that he actually speaks. (New Bearings in English Poetry)
F.R. Leavis
#7. The length and shape of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection and commentary.
Susan Stewart
#8. He spoke in english. Not flawlessly by any means. Not like a Nazi POW camp commandant who appreciates english poetry and says things like 'you know, we are much alike, you and I I'. But good enough
Alex Garland
#9. I never had much education in English poetry as such.
Anne Carson
#10. Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Mark Strand
#11. An English poet writes, I think, just for people who are interested in poetry. An American poet writes, and feels that everyone ought to appreciate this. Then he has a deep sense of grievance ...
Stephen Spender
#12. Farsi Couplet:
Naala-e zanjeer-e Majnun arghanoon-e aashiqanast
Zauq-e aan andaza-e gosh-e ulul-albaab neest
English Translation:
The creaking of the chain of Majnun is the orchestra of the lovers,
To appreciate its music is quite beyond the ears of the wise.
Amir Khusrau
#13. Powell belongs, in fact to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back.
Stephen Burt
#14. In my life are many windows
and many graves.
Sometimes they exchange
roles:
then a window is closed forever,
then by way of a gravestone
I can see
very far.
(Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager)
Yehuda Amichai
#15. The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
Walt Whitman
#16. But even we, with our supposed mastery of the English language, were not immune to the shortcoming of our vocabularies.
Words can only help you if you speak them.
Bianca Phipps
#17. With one perfect kiss on one perfect English summer afternoon, we understand the meaning of all the colors of every rainbow, forevermore.
Hunter S. Jones
#18. I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:
The past, present, and future walk into a bar - it was tense.
Kelli Russell Agodon
#19. If I wouldn't of spent so much time shooting spit wads at my English teacher I'd know how to punctuate good thing I normally write poetry.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#21. Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
Robert Graves
#22. An English girl might well believe
that time is how you spend your love.
Nick Laird
#23. She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.
Alice Walker
#24. It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.
Jess Walter
#25. English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs.
Peter Prasad
#26. Farsi Couplet:
Ba khak darat rau ast maara,
Gar surmah bechashm dar neaayad.
English Translation:
The dust of your doorstep is just the right thing to apply,
If Surmah (kohl powder) does not show its beauty in the eye!
Amir Khusrau
#27. A lot of them [Germaqn actors] could come in and we could speak for the next nine hours in English and there would be no problem. It was - but it was - English wasn't the language for them to read poetry in. And there is a - there's a poetic quality to my dialogue.
Quentin Tarantino
#28. What I really want is to be recognized as a writer; that someday, my poetry - this is an interesting paradox - would be taught in English classes; for my name, along with my poetry, to exist 500 years from now.
Harley King
#29. I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
Taylor Momsen
#30. Spanish and English have such different music, and in my own poetry I feel much less drawn to fluid sounds than I do toward the hard sounds and rhythms that come out of the Anglo-Saxon roots of English.
Joan Larkin
#31. I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
Alfred Nobel
#32. Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century, although his work is by no means either easy or very popular. Dense, intricate, exceedingly compact, his poetry has always had great visionary force.
John Hollander
#33. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
#34. I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.
Jack Prelutsky
#35. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
Victor Hugo
#36. All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we read poems about death, but here, right in front of me was a poem about death too.
Gabrielle Zevin
#37. When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.
Lisel Mueller
#38. Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.
Laura Mullen
#39. To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
Grace Paley
#40. Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.
George Edward Woodberry
#41. 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
#42. Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.
Helen Keller
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.
John Donne
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#62. 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
#63. The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Diane Wakoski
#70. 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
