Top 100 Poetry Was Quotes
#1. It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.
Meg Rosoff
#2. There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson
#3. Poetry was a barrier against raw
emotions. It distilled them into bearable
music, allowed one to accommodate them
a little at a time.
Alexander Moncrieffe
Julie Anne Long
#4. 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
#5. Poetry was the maiden I loved, but politics was the harridan I married.
Joseph Howe
#6. I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
Jonathan Galassi
#7. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#8. I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.
Grace Paley
#10. From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
Allen Ginsberg
#11. 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
#12. Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#13. 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
#14. The best words in the best order ... one always go the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Poetry was awful good material to think with.
Mary Stewart
#15. When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.
Billy Collins
#16. [Poetry] was a form of incantation, a means of welding the world inside his head to the one that surrounded him, words the fiery chain that bound it all together.
Elizabeth Hand
#17. When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.
Edward Hirsch
#18. That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
Ben Lerner
#19. I thought a bit of poetry might be interesting - I even write a few lines myself. I composed a short poem for my mum's 70th birthday recently. When I recited it I saw the glint of a tear in her eye ... although I guess it wasn't the quality of the poetry was that making her cry!
Iain Dowie
#20. The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
George Oppen
#21. Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.
Vito Acconci
#23. Those green irises were like gentle pools of brilliant meadows of sage and green-envy coneflowers swaying in a warm breeze.
HOLY fuck. What the hell sort of poetry was that dribbling out of my twisted brain?
Christine Zolendz
#24. Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.
Joseph Campbell
#25. Being president is as difficult as writing the perfect poem. And being president is as effortless as writing the perfect poem. Always a Reckoning, my first collection of poetry, was described by Booklist as 'keenly evocative.'
Jimmy Carter
#26. Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.
Claire Tomalin
#27. When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather ... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.
John Fuller
#29. Even though poetry was written for the 'minds ear' as well as the physical ear, the minds ear can be trained only by the other ... which comes back to reading poetry aloud ...
Yvor Winters
#30. For me, poetry was ... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.
Shane Koyczan
#31. Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.
Cassandra Clare
#32. While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an "A," as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published.
Denise Duhamel
#33. In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.
John McWhorter
#34. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
Damon Galgut
#35. His poetry was to find the enemy and kill him. It didn't rhyme, but it was still a work in progress.
Shane VanAulen
#36. At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.
Tobias Hill
#37. I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was ... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
Donald Hall
#38. I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Pablo Neruda
#39. Jule was a poet - poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.
Joan D. Vinge
#40. As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.
Denise Duhamel
#41. But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#42. Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
Peter Davison
#43. I used to joke that if acting didn't work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback.
Merritt Wever
#44. My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
Natasha Trethewey
#45. Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
Christopher Koch
#46. The poetry was so ahead of its time no one has deciphered it yet
Harper Lee
#47. The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.
Patricia Hampl
#48. For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#49. I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
Alice McDermott
#50. But now he understood why someone would write things like 'she walked in beauty like the night' and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time.
Julie Anne Long
#51. T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#52. When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.
Patti Smith
#53. Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
Donald Hall
#54. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity.
C.M. Kornbluth
#55. I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
Ben Okri
#56. Poetry: Foolish Passion of My Youth
Poetry was the foolish passion of my youth,
forsaken for twenty years
to raise a family.
When I returned to poetry in this,
my Autumn years,
my childhood was returned.
Now Poetry raises me.
Beryl Dov
#57. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Robert Morgan
#58. Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.
Vito Acconci
#59. Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
#60. I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
Christina Perri
#61. 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
#62. The Net
I made you many and many a song,
Yet never one told all you are
It was as though a net of words
Were flung to catch a star;
It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea.
Sara Teasdale
#63. That was not sex. That was naked poetry.
Hank Moody
#64. Since the dawn of time, primitive humans thought, loved and had poetry. They also pooped on everything. It was horrible.
Dana Gould
#65. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter - a mishmash of good intentions and ill design. And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.
Walter Mosley
#66. Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.
Edgar Allan Poe
#67. Autumn Dusk
I saw above a sea of hills
A solitary planet shine,
And there was no one, near or far,
to keep the world from being mine.
Sara Teasdale
#68. I have always been a fire, and everyone I loved walked away as ashes, until I met a phoenix who was born to love flames.
Jenim Dibie
#69. What differentiated us was our perception of our mutual reality, which made no difference.
Mie Hansson
#70. 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
#71. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. When the Earth was just a child,
He searched for his mother Venus;
And for his father Mars,
But they were not home;
They were gone elsewhere,
Out there, in the great expanse;
Beyond the breathing universe.
Stephan Attia
#75. I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.
Caroline Kennedy
#76. Sometimes you know that you are destined to die, but somehow you are given a parenthesis after the punctuation mark: more years, more time that wasn't meant for you but still was meant for you, a bridge stretching out into the stars, a confidence built of invisible threads, a miracle.
Lene Fogelberg
#77. She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
David Nicholls
#78. The inlet
our friend looks as he did
when we first knew him,
and until I wake I believe
I will die of grief, for I know
that this boy grew into a man
who was a faithful friend
who died.
Wendell Berry
#79. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#80. A sky
full
of stars
and he
was staring
at her.
- ATTICUS
Atticus Poetry
#81. I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
Luc Delahaye
#82. I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter ... '
Gary Oldman
#83. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#84. even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like.
N'Zuri Za Austin
#85. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Derek Walcott
#86. 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
#87. The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems.
Chet Raymo
#88. 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
#89. She was afraid of heights
but she was
much more afraid
of never flying.
Atticus Poetry
#90. When African slave Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry, 18 men came to assess whether that was possible.
Jacky Fleming
#91. Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.
John Ruskin
#92. And this is when I knew I was black for real.
This is when I knew black was a city
whose walls were constantly under siege....
Roger Bonair-Agard
#93. I was born in the night of the second and third
Of January, ninety-something-or-other,
An unreliable year, and the centuries
Surround me with fire.
Osip Mandelstam
#95. In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night ... starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.
Jim Morrison
#96. With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka's hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
Richard Brautigan
#97. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#98. She wasn't looking for a knight, she was looking for a sword.
Atticus Poetry
#99. I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.
Kenneth Koch
#100. She was too busy wishing
on shooting stars
to see the dreams
come true around her.
Atticus Poetry
