Top 100 Quotes About Great Poetry
#1. Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.
Helen Keller
#2. The great Poetry that creates out of the soul of humankind is inaccurately explained if we reduce it to the personal
C. G. Jung
#3. There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.
Richard Livingstone
#4. 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
#5. You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.
Felix Dennis
#6. Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
James Fenton
#7. The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves ... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.
Harold Bloom
#8. As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death."
Andrew Davies
#9. Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.
Helen Keller
#10. Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.
Jean Houston
#11. Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others.
Bryant McGill
#12. All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ...
Edith Sitwell
#13. The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.
David Whyte
#14. Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
Robinson Jeffers
#15. Great poetry is capable of dealing with erotic passion, but it has to be the very greatest to represent that deeper and more tortuous love
more rooted, more absolute
which we devote to our children, and which it is so hard to talk about.
Claudio Magris
#16. What raises great poetry above all else
it is the entire person and also the entire world.
Franz Grillparzer
#17. A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.
Kenneth Clark
#18. Mr. Yeats makes great poetry out of what he calls his unhappiness about me, and he is happy in that. - Maud Gonne
Orna Ross
#19. Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
Stephen Spender
#20. Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man.
Don DeLillo
#21. Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.
Dana Gioia
#22. Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more Civilized. Civilized my syphilised yarbles.
Anthony Burgess
#23. For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.
Donna Tartt
#24. The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.
Laura Marling
#26. It is a pity that no one in Paris bothered to quote Coleridge, who wrote, long before cubism, that the true poet is able to reduce 'succession to an instant.' Simultaneity in this sense is the property of all great poetry.
LeRoy C. Breunig
#27. Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.
Hugh Miller
#28. [Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
Milan Kundera
#29. 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
#30. What is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death?
Erica Jong
#31. Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
Witold Gombrowicz
#32. I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
Allen Tate
#33. One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.
James Agee
#34. 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
#35. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#36. 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
#37. Fuck I hate fucks
Who think they're so fucking great
They know everything about fucking,
When they're just fucking fucks fucking!
And no one changes the fucking world
When they keep fucking to another fuck's fuck.
Initially NO
#38. Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!
Dante Alighieri
#39. Life has sadness, joy, beauty, like poetry.
So be passionate and write a great story.
Debasish Mridha
#41. 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
#42. I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
Stella Benson
#43. There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. 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
#45. Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment
Wallace Stevens
#47. I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.
Mark Twain
#48. Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost
#49. Life is never beautiful, but only the pictures of life are so in the transfiguring mirror of art or poetry; especially in youth, when we do not yet know it. Many a youth would receive great peace of mind if one could assist him to this knowledge.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#50. On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
Viggo Mortensen
#51. And did with sighs their fate deplore,
Since I must shelter them no more;
And if before my joys were such,
In having heard, and seen too much,
My grief must be as great and high,
When all abandoned I shall be,
Doomed to a silent destiny.
Aphra Behn
#52. A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one.
Wallace Stevens
#53. The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech ... For true poetry is never speech but always a song.
Herbert Read
#54. She was the reason I started to write but her beauty is kept me writing.
Brandon Villasenor
#55. It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness.
Ernesto Cardenal
#56. Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
Robert Frost
#57. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#58. True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.
Sophie Swetchine
#59. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#60. The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of his heart.
Kate DiCamillo
#61. Some poems are written great, some poems are written swell. But then there are poems that could win a prize in Hell.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#62. When trying to explain anything, I usually find that the Bible, that great collection of magnificent and varied poetry, has said it before in the best possible way.
Amy Lowell
#63. Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
Chad Harbach
#64. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#65. But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.
Henry David Thoreau
#66. My love, can't you see
how much i love thee
For i through your eyes
shall see
Our great love
for all eternity
Amal Sagheer
#67. The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.
May Swenson
#68. Nature is bent on new beginning
and death has not a chance of winning ...
Rosy Cole
#69. Unlike Ronan, Adam's Aglionby jumper was second-hand, but he'd taken great care to be certain it was impeccable. He was slim and tall, with dusty hair unevenly cropped above a fine-boned, tanned face. He was a sepia photograph.
Maggie Stiefvater
#70. Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
Bayard Taylor
#71. The great fortunes of our day have rarely been accumulated through the sale of the most meaningful items and services, such as poetry or relationship counselling.
Alain De Botton
#72. As the American poet, Marianne Moore, said: There is a great deal of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness.
William Strunk Jr.
#73. History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
A. L. Rowse
#74. I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and however attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.
Lord Chesterfield
#75. In the great cities, winter glitters with art and feasting. But poetry, the country cousin, sees only the dearth of the fields.
Mason Cooley
#76. 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
#77. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#78. To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm ... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.
Georges Braque
#79. Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.
Sarah Kay
#80. A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#81. I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.
Francois Mauriac
#82. For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.
Alice Walker
#83. To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.
Fernando Pessoa
#84. I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.
Saul Williams
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#88. One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
#89. Christopher loved her with the passion of youth, of imagination, of poetry, of all the fresh beginnings of wonder and worship that have been since love first lit his torch and made in the darkness a great light.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#90. There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#91. Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
Anne Lamott
#92. Photography's potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.
Paul Caponigro
#93. I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
Jerry Hall
#94. Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.
Harry Mathews
#95. The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
#96. Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
Walter Savage Landor
#97. There may be losses too great to understand
That rove after you and
faint and terrible
rip unknown through your hand.
William Stafford
#98. Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare ... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare.
Victor Hugo
#99. When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
T. S. Eliot
#100. Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
Lascelles Abercrombie
