Poetry Shakespeare Quotes

#1. Poetry, Shakespeare and opera, are like mumps and should be caught when young. In the unhappy event that there is a postponement to mature years, the results may be devastating.

Dimitris Mita

#2. In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it.

Frederick Lenz

#3. What do you do when the alienating silence deafens your 'bootless cries'?

Solange Nicole

#4. After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?

Dejan Stojanovic

#5. I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

Oscar Wilde

#6. Willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind
me of nothing

Frank O'Hara

#7. I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

William Shakespeare

#8. Auden? Does he rhyme? I only like poetry that rhymes. All
the best poets write in rhyme."
"Really?"
"Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare. You can't do better than that.

Shiela Jane

#9. With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Peter Abrahams

#10. Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton , I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

Alfred North Whitehead

#11. It is something to have gazed on the constellated white,
felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love.
It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous
in the only ways we know how.

Bryana Johnson

#12. In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

Frederick Lenz

#13. I - will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all.

Marc Norman

#14. Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

Jay-Z

#15. I want to have a romance so grand,
it would have made Shakespeare fumble for words.

Sanober Khan

#16. TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle

Garrison Keillor

#17. The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.

Patti Smith

#18. Our fictions move us to do great things, things worth doing for no better reason than there's poetry in us. We dream before we do.

Bill Willingham

#19. Folly is
so human that it has common roots with poetry and tragedy; it is
revealed as much in the insane asylum as in the writings of a
Cervantes or a Shakespeare, or in the deep psychological insights
and cries of revolt of a Nietzsche.

Richard Howard

#20. Shakespeare's felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed.

B.J. Ward

#21. Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?

Edward Abbey

#22. Poetry's the speech of kings. You're one of those
Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose!
All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
's been dubbed by [Us] into RP,
Received Pronunciation, please believe [Us]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.

Tony Harrison

#23. A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Chaim Potok

#24. The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

Simon Schama

#25. When I was around 19 years old, working in the college library, I was talking to a friend of mine and this older woman interrupted and said "You're too young to know about Billie Holiday." My response was "I'm too young to know about Shakespeare, too ... should I not read him?

Wanda Lea Brayton

#26. Edith (the future Mrs. Teddy Roosevelt) developed a lifelong devotion to drama and poetry. "I have gone back to Shakespeare, as I always do," she would write seven decades later.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#27. 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

#28. Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.

George Edward Woodberry

#29. O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!

William Shakespeare

#30. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.

Richard Ronald Allan

#31. My nerves were wrapped so tight I could explode at any second. Some jaguar reciting poetry was not helping. Just tell me which way to go, Shakespeare.

Lisa Kessler

#32. Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.

William Collins

#33. 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

#34. Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.

Kenneth Branagh

#35. Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#36. Poets like Shakespeare know more about poetry than any $25 an hour man.

Robert Frost

#37. You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn's spinning pulsars ...

Brandi L. Bates

#38. I play guitar; you'll find me at home strumming 'Vincent' on the guitar. I also read a lot of poetry, and Shakespeare was my first love, which was why I got into acting. A lot of the fighters are intelligent!

Dave Legeno

#39. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy - about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.

Daniel Keyes

#40. My heart aches for you! But don't despair! I am persuaded you will come about! Recollect what the poet says! I'm not sure which poet, but very likely it was Shakespeare, because it generally is, though why I can't imagine!

Georgette Heyer

#41. Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

Peter Porter

#42. 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

#43. Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare.

Matthew Arnold

#44. At the top of the heap is poetry,at least as it used to be written.Nothing else goes far,nothing goes as deep n the blood and soul.Shakespeare surpasses Beethoven because he had sound and meaning.Always remember that as you get older.Poetry is in the emprean,TV is in the pit

Jeffrey Moore

#45. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.

Nikita Gill

#46. Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#47. Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare ... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.

Victor Hugo

#48. 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.

Diane Wakoski

#49. We number nothing that we spend for you;
Our duty is so rich, so infinite,
That we may do it still without accompt.
Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,
That we, like savages, may worship it.

William Shakespeare

#50. They think thee mad? I'll show thou mad, my lord.

Phar West Nagle

#51. To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.

George Gissing

#52. 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