Top 100 Poetry Language Quotes
#1. So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
Thomas Lynch
#2. Poetry: Language against which we have no defences.
David Whyte
#3. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#4. There are a lot of human experiences that challenge the limits of our language," she said. "That's one of the reasons that we have poetry.
Ava Dellaira
#5. Love's language is imprecise,
fits more like mittens than gloves.
Jeannine Atkins
#6. 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
#7. Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.
Ben Hecht
#8. I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
Edward Hirsch
#9. Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?
Jeanette Winterson
#10. Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.
David Whyte
#11. Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.
Orson F. Whitney
#12. Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
Jennifer McMahon
#13. But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#14. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage
#15. They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom's cause.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#16. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Terence McKenna
#17. Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
Robert Morgan
#18. Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.
Ezra Pound
#20. Poetry is the place where language in its silence is most beautifully articulated. Poetry is the language of silence.
John O'Donohue
#22. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
Kim Edwards
#23. Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process
of knowing by means of language.
Mark Doty
#25. 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
#26. The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
Octavio Paz
#27. 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
#28. a hymn then
not to birds but to words
which themselves feel
like feather and wing
and light, as if it were
on the delicacy of
such sweet syllables
that flocks take flight.
Kei Miller
#29. Poetry has its own unique language which every mind translates differently according to their own personal view.
Debasish Mridha
#31. Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.
Charles Wright
#32. I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Ezra Pound
#33. Someone handed me Mexico City Blues in St. Paul [Minnesota] in 1959 and it blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke my own language.
Bob Dylan
#34. The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.
Kim Hyesoon
#35. Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot
#36. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
Edward Hirsch
#37. 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
#38. I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.
Simon Armitage
#39. The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.
Richard M. Nixon
#40. Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
Eileen Myles
#41. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
Carl Sandburg
#42. Nas' Illmatic blew my mind when I first heard it. The poetry was done on such a high level that in a way, it validated our existence, our culture. He used the language of the street at the time and made it art. Art tends to be validating.
Erik Parker
#43. Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
John Denham
#44. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#45. Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.
Herbert McCabe
#46. Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.
Grant Morrison
#47. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.
Harold Innis
#48. You may translate books of science exactly ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.
Samuel Johnson
#49. Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.
Pattiann Rogers
#50. Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.
Eavan Boland
#51. People want poetry and need it - we need what's not honored by the corporate mentality that has taken over. It gives people a language for responding to the violence, the shallowness, the near-nothings, the toys we're all supposed to want. It's a way for people to be able to connect with themselves.
Joan Larkin
#52. If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.
Don DeLillo
#53. When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Niels Bohr
#55. Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Rita Dove
#56. 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.
Diane Wakoski
#57. To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard
#58. Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
June Jordan
#59. Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement.
Christopher Fry
#60. My sincere thanks to friends and family, especially my mother, father, brother, and Mandy, who continue to love and support me despite my obsessions.
Jonathan Ball
#61. We all need to learn a new language for love - a language that speaks not in socks, pancakes, and paychecks, but in shared fascination with physics or poetry, delight in each other's uniqueness, and mutual practical and emotional support.
Barbara Sher
#62. Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text.
Yuri Lotman
#63. Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#64. Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.
Diane Ackerman
#65. One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.
Pattiann Rogers
#66. Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.
Andrei Codrescu
#67. I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
Janet Fitch
#68. I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
Edward Hirsch
#69. Love's language starts, stops, starts;
the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.
Carol Ann Duffy
#70. A child playing with dolls may shed heartfelt tears when his bundle of rags and scraps becomes deathly ill and dies ... So we may come to an understanding of language as playing with dolls: in language, scraps of sound are used to make dolls and replace all the things in the world.
Velimir Khlebnikov
#71. Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith
#72. 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
#73. Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
James Martineau
#74. Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
John McWhorter
#75. The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema ...
Derek Jarman
#76. Language has not the power to speak what love indites
The soul lies buried in the Ink that writes
John Clare
#77. The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Robert Morgan
#78. Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
Umberto Eco
#79. And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?
Owen Barfield
#80. The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#81. 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
#82. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#83. 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
#84. Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.
Louis MacNeice
#85. Hay una estrella mas abierta
que la palabra 'amapola'?
Is there a star more wide open
than the word 'poppy?
Pablo Neruda
#86. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
#87. We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
Tracy K. Smith
#88. Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.
Edward Hirsch
#89. I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.
Pattiann Rogers
#90. 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
#91. Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Terry Eagleton
#92. The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
Mary Oliver
#93. 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.
Steven Pinker
#94. 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
#95. The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.
Mahmoud Darwish
#96. One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand
Novalis
#97. Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.
Mary Ruefle
#98. If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
Jim Jarmusch
#99. In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
Charles Simic
#100. Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
Donald Hall
