Top 100 Quotes About Poetry
#1. Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
Rebecca West
#2. One cannot live any longer on refrigerators, on politics, on balance-sheets and cross-word puzzles. One cannot live any longer without poetry, colour and love.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#3. Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud
#4. I wrote a lot of poetry that was based on stories of the sea and I was really inspired by that.
Ellie Goulding
#6. When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.
Kim Hyesoon
#7. I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry ... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.
Stephen Fry
#8. I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.
Michael Dirda
#9. Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.
Cristina Garcia
#10. [About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.
Niels Bohr
#11. Poetry keeps my heart neat, even when incomplete, I find peace.
Delano Johnson
#12. I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.
Dorianne Laux
#14. I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.
Steve Earle
#15. I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.
Charles Baudelaire
#16. I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.
Lisa Marie Presley
#17. Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.
Dana Gioia
#18. The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
Donald Knuth
#19. 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
#20. There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
Henry R. Luce
#21. When humankind possesses enormous new powers, and when the threat of famine, plague and war is finally lifted, what will we do with ourselves? What will the scientists, investors, bankers and presidents do all day? Write poetry? Success
Yuval Noah Harari
#22. Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
Diane Wakoski
#23. Let yourself become living poetry.
Rumi
#24. Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
Louis MacNeice
#25. Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.
Kenneth Koch
#26. Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight ... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty.
Stephanie Mills
#27. Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.
Sheldon Vanauken
#28. Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
Terry Eagleton
#29. I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.
Helen Mirren
#30. I don't have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#31. Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#32. I don't believe in tame poetry ... Poetry busts guts.
Frank Stanford
#33. It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.
Richard Russo
#34. Let your poetry be the light and see the true beauty of your words bloom into life, love, and inspiration.
Delano Johnson
#35. Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.
Naomi Shihab Nye
#36. I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.
Mark Strand
#37. I am inclined to believe that some music, like certain poetry, finds its appeal and way to all.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski
#38. How pleasant a world would be in which no man was allowed to operate on the Stock Exchange unless he could pass and examination in economics and Greek poetry, and in which politicians were obliged to have a competent knowledge of history and modern novels.
Bertrand Russell
#39. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big ones.
Donald Trump
#40. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who ... shall ... persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
#41. We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
Anais Nin
#42. Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.
Laura Mullen
#43. OMG! I DESIGNED THIS NEW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM! IT'S CALLED "POETRY" - YOU HAVE TO READ AMY KING'S POEMS TO GET AN INVITE ~
Amy King
#44. Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other-at least as much as love poetry-and cannot be forced because then it becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pan though all other poetry in order to become a political poet.
Pablo Neruda
#45. Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
Donald Hall
#46. Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.
Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.
Maxine Hong Kingston
#47. I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry.
Anais Nin
#50. Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
James Broughton
#51. I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#52. The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.
Caroline Kennedy
#53. After the war, I went to the University of Chicago, where I was pleased to study anthropology, a science that was mostly poetry, that involved almost no math at all.
Kurt Vonnegut
#54. The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
Barry Lopez
#56. Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
Horace Walpole
#57. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
Oscar Wilde
#58. What's important about poetry in the context of leadership is that most of the time, power has to do with dominance. But poetry is never about dominance. Poetry is powerful but it cannot even aspire to dominate anyone. It means making a connection. That's what it means.
June Jordan
#59. But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can't make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we're lucky, poetry.
Tim Parks
#60. Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
W. H. Auden
#61. Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.
Edward Hirsch
#63. The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
Matthew Arnold
#64. Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed - now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down ...
Brian Aldiss
#65. Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.
Annie Besant
#66. Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.
Kim Hyesoon
#67. Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.
Vikram Seth
#68. I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal link-ups. I sense that poetry happens at a level above or below intelligence. It doesn't come into being at a purely rational level.
Michael Longley
#69. Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes ... whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber ... they're listening to poetry.
Maya Angelou
#70. Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.
Andrei Codrescu
#71. High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
Diane Wakoski
#72. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.
Annie Dillard
#73. I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
Alice McDermott
#74. I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.
Pauley Perrette
#75. The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Matthew Arnold
#76. Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?
Virginia Woolf
#78. I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
Anais Nin
#79. What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#81. Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
#82. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.
C.D. Wright
#83. When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.
Lisel Mueller
#84. The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
#85. I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.
Edwin Morgan
#86. No, thank you," he flashed that grin of his. "I've been wondering what the lair of a poetry-inclined psychologist looks like.
Gina Marinello-Sweeney
#87. A sunset is always more beautiful when it is covered with irregularly shaped clouds, because only then can it reflect the many colors out of which dreams and poetry are made. Pity
Paulo Coelho
#88. I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
James Dickey
#89. I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
John Darnielle
#90. The sensual and spiritual are the same energy playing at different speeds, like poetry and dance" Alla Bozarth Campbell.
Alla Bozarth-Campbell
#91. Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates that there need be no barriers in poetry; that the philosophical, the lyrical and the playful can be combined in work of assured and generous vision.
John Burnside
#92. I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.
Charlie Sheen
#93. Poetry, in the past, was the center of our society, but with modernity it has retreated to the outskirts. I think the exile of poetry is also the exile of the best of humankind.
Octavio Paz
#94. Marriage is a book in which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
Beverley Nichols
#95. Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#96. The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art.
Robert Turnbull
#97. Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
Donald Hall
#98. The Canadian people are more practical than imaginative. Romantic tales and poetry would meet with less favour in their eyes than a good political article from their newspapers.
Susanna Moodie
#99. Country music is the poetry of the American spirit.
Steve Maraboli
#100. When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
C. K. Williams
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