Top 100 Quotes About Reading Poetry
#1. 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.
#2. It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
#3. I love the pleasure of reading poetry.
#4. I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'
#5. Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.
#6. And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
#7. Ah, hello." He gathered his courage. This was just like reading poetry, but subtract poems and add people casually placing hunting knives and daggers on their tables. One of the women was filing her fingernails into sharp points, like claws. Just like reading poetry.
#8. Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.
#9. In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
#10. Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.
#11. 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.
#12. If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.
#13. 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.
#14. 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.
#15. The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
#16. Reading poetry and watching cricket were the sum of my world, and the two are not so far apart as many aesthetes might believe.
#17. I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose;
it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting
far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes
reading poetry seem more natural.
#18. 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 ...
#19. I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
#20. I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy ...
#21. I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
#22. Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.
#23. Stani walks in later, glaring at them both.
"Bloody bastards. One minute punching each other, next minute reading poetry. What's wrong with everyone this week?"
Tom can tell that
#24. Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
#25. So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
#26. I'm angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating icecream or kissing a boy or maybe a girl ...
#27. I was reading poetry to my girlfriends, and they were like, 'You're really good. You should go to some poetry readings or something.' And I eventually went and got a, you know, somewhat of a name for myself and a little bit of a following.
#28. Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.
#29. I could feel it--inside, and I decided that night, reading poetry beneath a caged light bulb, that real was when you could fee your whole body light up from within.
#30. I think vampires have gotten maybe a little bit silly in the last years where they're all wearing crushed velvet and reading poetry and making sweet love to their victims, you know, it's not really all that scary.
#31. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
#32. 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.
#33. 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.
#34. A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.
#35. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
#36. 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.
#37. 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.
#38. Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.
#39. There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.
#40. From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
#41. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.
#42. For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
#43. After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and religious and desperately sad.
#44. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
#45. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
#46. Poetry reading is the chamber music of the actor's craft.
#47. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
#48. Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.
#49. There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles.
#50. Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
#51. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
#52. I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.
#53. You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
#54. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
#55. Poetry is a connection to a change within you.
#56. It's not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.
#57. Read a poem at a time, or two, or all, but give them time to sink into your heart. Read them again, read a portion, and stop and ponder. Visualize. Take it slow; let the poem show you what lies in your own heart. Let it fuel the words from within.
#58. You fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought ...
#59. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
#60. We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.
#61. Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body.
#62. Who are you, a hundred years from today, reading my poetry with curiosity?
#63. Poetry is not for profit. Poetry is for Posterity.
#64. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
#65. I read for pleasure
In search of fictional worlds
To enrich my truths
#66. Reading blogs would be like sentencing yourself to stand in a virtual online corner, trapped by some crashing bore who only wanted to talk about trains, or his poetry, or something.
#67. Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
#68. The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper
#69. To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
#70. Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
#71. Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
#72. Watch, how the sun
slowly rises
from behind my ear
new lines, new countries
spring up in my palms
my rough hair
become swaying silk
and all the leaves
in my body
become lusher than fruits.
#73. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
#74. I know they're not actually talking but the books on my desk seem to whisper "Drop what you're doing! Set aside your poetry! Open us, read us! Read slowly while you're at it. Always read us - every day - before you play.
#75. Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
#76. Haiku does not express emotion from the inside out by displaying the mind of a character. Haiku builds the emotional thrust, makes the artistic statement from the outside in, from the physical world to the mind of the reader.
#77. The ultimate aim of reading or writing poetry is to enrich one's life experience.
#78. 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.
#79. 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.
#80. How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way?
#81. He does not always remain bent over the
pages; he often leans back and closes
his eyes over a line he has been reading
again, and its meaning spreads through
his blood.
#82. I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.
#83. A trip to the market in the morning to buy bread, an afternoon spent reading in a cafe - nothing was routine; a strange place helped you find the poetry in everyday life.
#84. True fragrance speaks for itself. It does not require to be pointed out by the bearer.
#85. I do not have more information after reading a poem; I have more experience.
#86. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.
#87. No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down
impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
#88. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
#89. I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
#90. A precious, mouldering pleasure 't is
To meet an antique book,
In just the dress his century wore;
A privilege, I think.
#91. I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
#92. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
#93. A fortress built long ago,
Walls made timeless by historic glory.
The small girl in the boat slows,
To listen to its story.
#94. 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.
#95. My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.
#96. An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.
#97. I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn't really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something.
#98. When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
#99. I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.
#100. I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.
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