Top 100 Poetry's Quotes
#1. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.
Basil Bunting
#2. Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
Jane Hirshfield
#3. Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.
Jane Hirshfield
#4. Muse [10w]
Poetry's a collaboration with your muse.
Silence!
Let her speak.
Beryl Dov
#6. Poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.
Major Jackson
#7. I've been told by many the art of poetry's dead, I believe it's alive on pages they haven't read
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#8. I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.
Jane Hirshfield
#9. I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
Philip Levine
#10. Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked in poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.
Charles Dickens
#11. poetry's favourite moment is when one loses one's footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought
Michel Leiris
#12. However, for Hardy the possibility of poetry's traditional function of transcendence remains, but in a more limited form. In Hardy's work the poet transcends himself towards humanity, affirming the central values of loving-kindness and fellowship.
Geoffrey Harvey
#13. Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.
Billy Collins
#14. Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.
Robert Pinsky
#16. A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.
Jane Hirshfield
#18. I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance.
Sandra Cisneros
#19. Poetry Calling [10w]
Poetry's not a calling.
It's a whispering in your ear.
Beryl Dov
#20. Poetry's magic lies in the imagery which satifies even without interpretation..it is accepted as easily as it was created.
Robert Bridges
#21. I think one of poetry's functions is not to give us what we want ... The poet isn't always of use to the tribe. The tribe thrives on the consensual. The tribe is pulling together to face the intruder who threatens it. Meanwhile, the poet is sitting by himself in the graveyard talking to a skull.
Heather McHugh
#22. Poetry's packaged as a late-night slot, a quote minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something.
Julian Barnes
#23. Poetry fights against the injustice of this world. Poetry's truths are ageless.
Delano Johnson
#24. But I,
from poetry's skies,
plunge into communism,
because
without it
I feel no love.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#25. Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving
Jane Hirshfield
#26. As Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) pointed out, twilight 'is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.' Then again, maybe poetry's chief use is to inspire us to watch the sun go down.
Jessica Kerwin Jenkins
#27. It is humor's job to laugh at the futility oft engendered by the improbable; but it is poetry's job to dream of the potentiality of that which is not impossible.
D.E. Navarro
#28. Maybe poetry's not so important, but ... it makes life worth living.
Arda Collins
#29. Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.
Richard Hell
#30. The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.
Peter Gizzi
#31. I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.
Natasha Trethewey
#32. The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
Jane Hirshfield
#33. Poetry's one thing and love is another. It's just the same as it is in farming. The beauty of nature is one thing and the income from your forests or fields is quite another.
Anton Chekhov
#34. Between religion's this is and poetry's but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
Northrop Frye
#35. I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
Tennessee Williams
#36. If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.
Augustus William Hare
#37. 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
#38. I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#39. I wanna strike gold in Poetry's mine.
(But I don't want your money.)
B. Diehl
#40. Poetry's medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.
Robert Pinsky
#41. Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.
Allen Ginsberg
#43. I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
#44. In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
#45. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.
Jim Harrison
#46. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#47. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
#48. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#49. 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
#50. Poetry is more than just art, it's like super glue to a broken heart. It can also be a light when your life seems a little dark.
Delano Johnson
#51. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
Ed Koch
#52. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#53. Linear's defeated form
The intangible reality rise.' ~ Wanderer
Stella Coulson
#54. The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.
Teresa Palmer
#55. Following dark winter's strife, a warm air rises, teemed with life. Birth, rebirth, as the waiting die. Old love, new love sprouts wings to fly.
Phar West Nagle
#56. 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
#57. Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Dylan Thomas
#58. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
#59. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde
#60. 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
#61. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#62. It still is on the run,
time that is.
Sometimes it seems like everything's changing;
my whole world is rearranging.
Everything's different,
and yet everything's the same.
Time is just a crazy game.
Amanda Leigh
#63. 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
#64. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#65. Life, it turns out, isn't poetry! And do you know why? Because it's so resistant to criticism!
Andrzej Sapkowski
#66. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker
#67. Sometimes the rain
falls
just for you and me
to be the violin
playing
in the background
of our loneliness's song.
Sanober Khan
#68. My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet.
W. H. Auden
#69. Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.
Hunter S. Jones
#70. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.
Sam Hamill
#71. Love's language is imprecise,
fits more like mittens than gloves.
Jeannine Atkins
#72. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
#73. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#74. When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on".
Fred Rogers
#75. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Jim Goetz
#76. When I usually outshine the light, I look for evanescence. The ending to my resplendence is much more divine, when it's singing a sweet lullaby of captured shine.
Lionel Suggs
#77. TOMORROW'S WILL
Silent world, I find myself,
Glad no one hears my thoughts.
In dark cocoon, I hibernate,
Yet spirit spills every thought.
A second chance to try again.
The risks I know too well.
Two sunsets turning into six-
Awaits tomorrow's will.
Giorge Leedy
#78. Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ...
Muse
#79. What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth
Mary Jo Bang
#81. 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
#82. It's not easy to define poetry.
Bob Dylan
#83. THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION OF ORSON SCOTT CARD Experience Card's full versatility, from science fiction to fantasy, from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction.
Orson Scott Card
#84. Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
C.S. Lewis
#85. Needle in a haystack's easy - just bring a magnet."
Eliot stared witheringly at Hardison. "You take the poetry out of everything."
"Says the man who'd just punch the haystack.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#86. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.
K.Y. Robinson
#87. Then who is it?" said Arthur. "Well," said Ford, "if we're lucky it's just the Vogons come to throw us in to space." "And if we're unlucky?" "If we're unlucky," said Ford grimly, "the captain might be serious in his threat that he's going to read us some of his poetry first ... .
Douglas Adams
#88. The greatness of poetry comes from its struggle to express the rapture of the soul in the contemplation of beauty.
Anthony S. Maulucci
#89. If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.
Kathy Acker
#90. 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
#91. To fine that light within
that's the genius of poetry.
Julie Harris
#92. 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
#93. Poetry can change hearts but not the politician's heart.
Marty Rubin
#94. 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
#95. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#96. Sparrows and cats will live in my shoe,
Sooner than I will live with you.
Fish will come walking out of the sea,
Sooner than you will come back to me.
Peter S. Beagle
#97. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#98. Gotta get a tight grip, don't slip, loose lips, sank ships, it's a trip, I love the way she licks her lips.
Tupac Shakur
#99. He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler
Soren Kierkegaard
#100. When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.
Marv Levy
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