Top 100 Poetry Things Quotes
#1. It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
Jason Newsted
#2. Rat sculled gently homewards in a dreamy mood, murmuring poetry-things over to himself,
Kenneth Grahame
#3. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#4. A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born ... in poetry.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#5. keep following your heart.
it won't always be easy, but it'll be the most important thing you'll do.
AVA.
#6. The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.
Miguel De Cervantes
#7. Fire is calling my name. It is whispering words of encouragement, sweet things. It wants out, for me to fan the heat until it's a vortex that can't and won't be stopped.
Alexandra Bracken
#8. Let us remember ... that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.
Christian Wiman
#9. I'm running out of things to say.
I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain
and more rain
and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra.
Shinji Moon
#10. some winters
will never melt
some summers
will never freeze
and some things will only
... live in poems.
Sanober Khan
#11. I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.
Edward Hirsch
#12. All we're trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
#13. Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.
Rae Armantrout
#14. Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#15. 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
#16. everyone is in a hurry and things are always disappearing, and i am always left standing here--
alone, waiting for the things that stay.
AVA.
#17. He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
#18. You grow. You are large.
You are a 19th century poem.
All of America is inside you,
a catalogue of lives and land
and burrowing things.
-From "Catalogue
Donika Kelly
#19. There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
#20. I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
Margarita Engle
#21. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#22. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Terence McKenna
#23. Illegibility
of this world. All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify
the splitting hour,
hoarsely.
You , clamped
into your deepest part,
climb out of yourself
for ever.
Paul Celan
#24. You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
Robert Morgan
#25. Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
James Dickey
#26. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day
Virgil
#27. Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.
Nikki Giovanni
#28. Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry.
Gerald Stern
#29. Your spiritual heart imbibes in the primordial light and, as you dance towards infinity, you begin to see all things are held together by the power of love.
Earthschool Harmony
#30. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Alan Watts
#31. The sun surrendered its splendor - why, it was like poetry; he was a poet; Norman smiled. He was many things. If they only knew - - But
Robert Bloch
#32. Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!
Roberto Benigni
#33. I often tell people to stop being afraid of writing bad poetry, or bad anything. I think that a lot of times, when people claim that they have writer's block, or that they get stuck, it's just because they're scared of writing bad things.
Sarah Kay
#34. Imagining is in itself the very height and life of poetry, which, by a kind of enthusiasm or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints.
John Dryden
#35. I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip Larkin
#36. 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
#37. It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
Billy Collins
#38. I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
Shelby Foote
#39. Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
Richard Siken
#40. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things.
J.D. Salinger
#41. 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
#42. Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand."
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#43. A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one.
Wallace Stevens
#44. There is a deep truth in being at home enough with someone to kiss them while your lips are dry. And happiness may not be the greatest of things to hear, but it should be.
Mikl Paul
#45. Kanai, the dreamers have everyone to speak for them,' she said, 'But those who try to be strong, who try to build things - no one ever sees any poetry in that, do they?
Amitav Ghosh
#46. Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall.
Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen
#47. One reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#48. There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
Rupert Brooke
#49. Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Joseph Brodsky
#50. Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese absolutely enchanted me, for they took away all sense of subject ... It was the poetry of color which I felt, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see, and distinct from their cause.
Washington Allston
#51. No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of.
Sinclair Lewis
#52. We must experience certain things in life, even in our childhood, so we can later look back and value the journey.
Tanya R. Liverman
#53. Let your love flow where the beautiful things are and something beautiful will always come your way.
Robert M. Drake
#54. There are things that are not sayable. That's why we have words.
Amy King
#55. One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
Edward Hirsch
#56. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.
Paul Kingsnorth
#57. Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold
#58. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
#59. I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute.
Alexandre Dumas
#60. What science cannot declare, art can suggest; what art suggests silently, poetry speaks aloud; but what poetry fails to explain in words, music can express.
Whoever knows the mystery of vibrations indeed knows all things.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#61. Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street ... Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.
Wassily Kandinsky
#62. And that is the nature of us poets and whores, to make things hard: dicks, choices... life.
Nicole Lyons
#63. If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there.
Khalil Gibran
#64. Time will tell if it was well spent.
Time will tell where all your ideas went.
Time will allow you to achieve your goals.
Time is too precious to put on hold.
Don't waste time on meaningless things.
Take advantage of its benefits and all life brings.
Bianca McCormick-Johnson
#65. Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.
Elliott Colla
#66. I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.
Edward Hirsch
#67. Nothing says you care for me better than offering to torture my enemies."
He grinned. "No sense doing things halfhearted. And to think, some girls have to endure listening to poetry.
Maria V. Snyder
#68. Meditation is the most significant because it opens the door for all other significant things: love, prayer, God, light, music, poetry.
Rajneesh
#69. Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. ... All those things.
R.M. Engelhardt
#70. You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and
Just tired.
So am I.
E. E. Cummings
#71. I am from the Mediterranean area, I have to feel everything. I am a physical person, but I guess that things that you cannot touch and cannot see are also touchable and visible - light, poetry, music.
Jaume Plensa
#72. There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.
Mark Twain
#73. Poetry at least in my own life, is really about your own mortality. Everything in poetry makes me think of my mortality. It is not a dark thing in life; it prepares you for the graceful things that happen in your life. It gives me a license to make any kind of picture I want with great courage.
Keith Carter
#74. Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
William Carlos Williams
#75. Your words on the screen are my color palette
I dip my brush into your words and paint you
On the sky, on the ceiling, on the snow; on the tablet
Of things eternal : love truth beauty happiness
Richard L. Ratliff
#76. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls - what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in - these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
Tom Stoppard
#77. I adore forgotten words, long lost folk tales, and books with pages soft and crumbling. I am a collector of scents and memories. The things that others bury are the things I hold most dear.
Nichole McElhaney
#78. But it isn't easy,' said Pooh. 'Because Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.
A.A. Milne
#79. Poetry is not a way of saying things; it's a way of seeing things.
Karl Shapiro
#80. Life without love is like a bird without feathers. Life without love is like a butterfly without wings it's the saddest of things.
"In this life I can live without many things love is not on that list
Charles W. Warner
#81. The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.
R.H. Blyth
#82. 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
#83. The reason his father has no time for poetry is that he is afraid of the messiness of life. Poetry feeds on all that spills over the boundaries of the usual things, the everyday things with which most people are obsessed, so William has no time for it.
Elliot Perlman
#84. I promised no more poetry and I'd rather think of this as a confession: you are still the first person I want to share new things with.
Trista Mateer
#85. 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
#86. I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.
W.S. Merwin
#88. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come. -Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne
#89. A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Walter Pater
#90. I teach Zen, tantric mysticism, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, Tibetan mysticism, occultism and psychic development. I also teach poetry and literature, film and many other different things.
Frederick Lenz
#91. I think my brain is full of collisions and that's how I like to read and process information. I'm always comparing things and I think I do that subconsciously when I'm reading books of poetry.
Victoria Chang
#92. If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
Roger McGough
#93. I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
Camille Paglia
#94. It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,
anonymous faces on the street,
a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,
a million forgotten hours.
Billy Collins
#95. Poetry, in the entire course of its development, has always been trying to capture meanings and problems which are still obscure and dormant. Poetry tries to awaken them with a kiss, wherever they may be: in the air, in things, in human beings.
Mieczyslaw Jastrun
#96. Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.
Wallace Stevens
#97. Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group? He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls.
Warren G. Bennis
#98. Poetry is my first love. Photography often fails to look into things. It looks at things. Poetry is so much more truthful.
Larry Towell
#99. 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
#100. I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I'm trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.
Sarah Kay
