Top 100 Poetry Is Music Quotes
#1. Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.
Nikki Giovanni
#2. Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.
Amiri Baraka
#3. Poetry is music written for the human voice.
Maya Angelou
#4. Poetry is music for the human voice. Until you actually speak it or someone speaks it, it has not come into its own.
Maya Angelou
#5. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#6. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#7. Let my name perish,
the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,
and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.
Sidney Lanier
#8. For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
Cornel West
#9. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#10. I like putting common expressions next to uncommon expressions. I'm sure in Poetry 101 there is a name for it, but it seems like you usually go one way or the other in rock music.
Dan Bejar
#11. For each of us is
A separate miracle
In a collective miracle
Brought together
For a moment
By a group of notes
And a scan of words
From the heart
Of one
Who dares
To think
That others
Might feel
As he feels
Leonard Nimoy
#12. Shall I tell you our secret? We are charming thieves who steal hearts and never fail because we are the friends of the One.
Blessed is the poem that comes through me but not of me because the sound of my own music will drown the song of Love.
Rumi
#13. I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
Michael Graves
#14. There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.
Edward Hirsch
#15. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#16. Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.
Atticus
#17. The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Charles Darwin
#18. I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
#19. Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.
Ben Fountain
#20. Poetry reading is the chamber music of the actor's craft.
Robert Lacey
#21. 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
#23. The trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments ... it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst.
Hector Berlioz
#24. Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up.
Deborah Meyler
#25. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.
Edgar Allan Poe
#26. One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.
Stephen Sondheim
#27. There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.
Yanni
#28. Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!
Dmitri Shostakovich
#29. Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.
David Lee Roth
#30. There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.
Umberto Boccioni
#31. I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.
Criss Jami
#32. What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.
Fernand Leger
#33. Meditation is the most significant because it opens the door for all other significant things: love, prayer, God, light, music, poetry.
Rajneesh
#34. Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
Colin Wilson
#35. Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#36. The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#37. For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Eugenio Montale
#38. The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.
Curt Sachs
#39. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#40. Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music.
Benjamin Clementine
#41. The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#42. Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves.
Victor Hugo
#43. Poetry ... is the music and painting of the mind.
Sonia Orwell
#44. In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.' ~ Randy Morgenson
Eric Blehm
#45. Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting
Edouard Vuillard
#46. One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
#47. Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
David Josiah Brewer
#48. The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.
Aberjhani
#49. Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.
Frances Ridley Havergal
#50. Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
James Martineau
#52. Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
Dennis Gabor
#53. Poetry is very similar to music, only less notes and more words.
Eddie Izzard
#54. Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.
Karen Armstrong
#55. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
E.B. White
#56. Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.
Pattiann Rogers
#58. Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#59. Is the phrase 'pay' or 'play the piper'
I inquire, why
'Cause I admire a desire to flip the switch
Yeah make a way to face the music like
Life savings for a mosh pit riot
Listen to a mix
Rock the tickets, higher volume
Velocity which shakes a cockpit's pilot
Criss Jami
#60. The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W. H. Auden
#61. Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.
Jean Houston
#62. Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.
Susan Hill
#63. Our culture is our strength be it music, dance, poetry or anything, and these are very precious.
Narendra Modi
#64. When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Denis Diderot
#65. Beauty is so rare a th
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card
- from 15 False Propositions Against God [1958]
Jack Spicer
#66. Music helps to forget
This forsaken tomb,
That is my abode
Cellars down
Far below
Under the ground, ...
E.A. Bucchianeri
#67. What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow!
Sergei Rachmaninoff
#68. The music that really moves me is music that's written by people where there isn't a lot of money and they're really singing with just their voice and a guitar about their feelings and about their life. Their poetry is relatively simple, in the sense that it's about their soul in jeopardy.
Anton Yelchin
#69. 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.
Malcolm Wilson
#70. Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.
Van Wyck Brooks
#71. In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry
in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.
Dodie Smith
#72. In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
Archie Shepp
#73. Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.
H.L. Mencken
#74. As in art, poetry, music, etc., the best theology is worked out in pain
Steve Chalke
#75. The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
Gene Weingarten
#76. The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
#77. It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
George Eliot
#78. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote
#79. Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.
C. K. Williams
#80. Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
#81. For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.
Carol Ann Duffy
#82. Prose poetry is not set to a melody or music so there's something freeing about it.
William Beckett
#83. For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.
Pattiann Rogers
#84. I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.
Tamsin Greig
#85. The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Charles Baudelaire
#86. Being in love is something like poetry. Certainly, you can analyze and expound its various senses and intentions, but there is always something left over, mysteriously hovering between music and meaning.
Muriel Spark
#87. As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play the music in spite of that.
Philip Pullman
#88. Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.
Aberjhani
#89. Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!
Lori R. Lopez
#90. The music is a vibration in the brain rather than the ear.
Amy Clampitt
#91. The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - can we really reach each other,
Leslie Marmon Silko
#92. The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.
James Gates Percival
#93. I laugh when people say they don't like poetry. They listen to poetry every day, what do they think music is?
Shannon Lynette
#94. I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal, and is known as the harmonic series.
Leonard Bernstein
#95. There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
Jean De La Bruyere
#96. The physical impact of taiko music, along with the sheer visual poetry of a choreographed ensemble presenting its music in perfect synchrony, is so powerful and inviting that taiko is beginning to catch on as Japan's most influential and lasting gift to world music.
Gil Asakawa
#97. Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#98. To read a poem
Is to see light where there is darkness
Is to hear silence where there is noise
Is to dance where there is no music
Is to sing where the only instrument is words
And the stirring, impassioned pauses
A.A. Patawaran
#99. What I think we need to do is infuse everyday and every action with the kind of values we hope will be in the future, with kindness, with nurturing, with dreams, ambition, using your talents, not resorting to violence, other forms of conflict resolution, with humor, with poetry, with music.
Gloria Steinem
#100. I love poetry, be it in music or be it in Andrei Tarkovsky, Francesca Woodman or anyone else, I just love poetry.
Graciela Iturbide
