Top 100 Quotes About The Poetry
#1. Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.
Paul Valery
#3. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.
Jim Harrison
#4. 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
#5. What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
Charles Baudelaire
#6. I have a sickness doctors can't cure,
Inexorably pulling me to the well of my destruction,
Consented to be a sacrifice, killed for her love,
Eager, like the drunk gulping wine mixed with poison,
Shameless were those my nights,
Yet my soul loved them beyond all passion.
Ibn Hazm
#7. Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?
Christina Rossetti
#8. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#9. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
#10. 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
#11. Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.
Mahmoud Darwish
#12. remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe.
you are capable of love.
AVA.
#13. 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
#14. This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.
Mary Oliver
#15. Dancing to the sounds of trees and stones and slow minutes ticking in our hearts and bones.
Jay Woodman
#16. Dying only means moving into a nicer house.
We have only gone into the next room.
We still are what we have always been.
We aren't far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.
Kerry Okines
#17. 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
#18. Sometimes the rain
falls
just for you and me
to be the violin
playing
in the background
of our loneliness's song.
Sanober Khan
#19. The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice.
Earle Birney
#20. Unhappie Verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
Make thy selfe fluttring wings of thy fast flying
Thought
Edmund Spenser
#21. You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
Madeleine L'Engle
#22. I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.
Matt Haig
#23. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#24. To split the very sea into ours and theirs. Border at the Beach
And More White Sheets
Eileen Granfors
#25. They only want to weep
As after the huge wars
Senseless huge wars
Huge senseless weeping.
Ted Hughes
#26. I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play,
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away;
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street,
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.
Charles Baudelaire
#27. 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
#28. The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.
Flora Rheta Schreiber
#29. There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle.
Dejan Stojanovic
#30. 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
#31. All we're trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
#32. 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
#33. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#34. she lived with hurricane eyes and fell in love with the way the waves collapsed against her cheeks.
Christopher Poindexter
#35. 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
#36. We saw a hole in the Chicago poetry scene that slam couldn't fill. I think a lot more can be done with the form than just competition.
Robbie Q. Telfer
#38. 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
#39. Much Madness Is Divinest Sense
Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye
Much Sense - the starkest Madness
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail
Assent - and you are sane
Demur - you're straightway dangerous
And handled with a Chain -
Emily Dickinson
#40. A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.
Anais Nin
#41. Cotton rows crisscross the world
And dead-tired nights of yearning
Thunderbolts on leather strops
And all my body burning
Sugar cane reach up to God
And every baby crying
Shame a blanket of my night
And all my days are dying
Maya Angelou
#42. Since when," he asked,
"Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?
Seamus Heaney
#43. I love to feel the temperature drop and the wind increase just before a thunderstorm. Then I climb in bed with the thunder.
Amanda Mosher
#44. Later that night she picked the polish off
with her front teeth until the bed you shared
for seven years seemed speckled with glitter
and blood.
Warsan Shire
#45. I think ... that philosophy has the duty of pointing out the falsity of outworn religious ideas, however estimable they may be as a form of art. We cannot act as if all religion were poetry while the greater part of it still functions in its ancient guise of illicit science and backward morals ...
Corliss Lamont
#46. I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.
Kurt Cobain
#47. a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.
Ted Kooser
#48. Sometimes having little or no money makes you want to steal and live your life the only way you want to
Martellis Thurmand
#50. There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.
Dejan Stojanovic
#51. 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
#53. So quiet now my dearest knight
your armor shines white still
for my lips shall not say the words
that make you flee with fear
White Knight
Shay Leigh
#54. Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.
Erasmus Darwin
#55. I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing ... not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.
Langston Hughes
#56. The temporal heart resonates at whispers
From a Truth overarching
Of whose countenance
Timeless Intellect yearns vainly to fathom
Ashim Shanker
#57. I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!
Margarita Engle
#58. I've never seen beauty
so devastating
as in the lines
that trace our hope
and fall from the stars.
Jessica Kristie
#59. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#60. If I never meet you
In this life
Let me feel the lack
A glance from your eyes
Then my life
Will be yours
James Jones
#61. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Tobias Wolff
#62. And if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
(from i must become a menace to my enemies)
June Jordan
#63. Rare indeed is the seed who can bury its nightmares & still stem & blossom into its wildest dreams.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
#64. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!
Anne Carson
#66. 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
#67. Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.
Bei Dao
#68. For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
Adrienne Rich
#69. I hate the very noise of troublous man
Who did and does me all the harm he can.
Free from the world I would a prisoner be
And my own shadow all my company.
John Clare
#70. Gain knowledge and feed your brain so you can obtain the strength that is needed to break free.
Fatimah Abdur-Rahim
#71. Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.
Edwin Morgan
#72. More often than not in poetry I find difficulty to be gratuitous and show-offy and camouflaging, experimental to a kind of insane degree - a difficulty which really ignores the possibility of having a sensible reader.
Billy Collins
#73. 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
#74. Plato said: 'He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.'
Chuck Palahniuk
#75. In mauve sea-orchids as in her striking earlier book Guardians of the Secret, Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros.
Forrest Gander
#76. 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
#77. If the sun rolled back like an eye,
it would see the mind of God.
Cecilia Llompart
#78. Poets are Prisoners
8-29-2015
Poets are prisoners
Practitioners, commissioners &
conditioners of the spoken word
Caged by their own minds
Words are shackles
Debbie Tosun Kilday
#79. I've been used to consider poetry as the food of love " Mr.Darcy
Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away." Eliza
Jane Austen
#80. He remembers which sister
I like least and asks
how she is doing.
(lines 9-11 of the poem 'Divorce')
Carrie Etter
#81. And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?
Mark Strand
#82. The words I speak to these chairs
must be silencing.
It has stunned them
into a profound emptiness.
No creaking from the gallery
no James Joyce here, nor Malory
An unknown author
in a very large chain
can't you hear me rattling?
B.J. Ward
#83. Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.
Patti Smith
#84. We were all born to the same world but with much greater circumstance
but with these two hands and what I have been given
I will build so much more
from Dexterity
K.R. Albers
#85. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#86. And Death it calls as the stone crow breaks. Streaks of blood malform its face.
Death becomes its withered eyes and the shadows whisper, "Lies."
Excerpt from "Lies
Angela B. Chrysler
#87. If emptiness is endless, then everything rests in emptiness.
Dejan Stojanovic
#88. The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Seamus Heaney
#89. Because who hasn't tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity's lead coat?
Who doesn't have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?
Lucia Perillo
#90. The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.
Theo Dorgan
#92. How much of twentieth-century poetry, how much of my own poetry, is the cry of the damned?
Christian Wiman
#93. True art
comes
from flying
with the madness
so close
you burn
your eyelashes.
Atticus Poetry
#94. Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
Philip Levine
#95. For your sake I have braved the glen, and had to do with goblin merchant men. Eat me, drink me, love me. Hero, Wolf, make much of me. With clasping arms and cautioning lips, with tingling cheeks and fingertips, cooing all together.
April Genevieve Tucholke
#96. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.
Tyrtaeus
#98. Painting can be like poetry but as somebody who creates both I feel the necessity for both so they cant be that similar. Sometimes I think it's as basic as not wanting to get dirty.
Danny Fox
#99. If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
William Stafford
#100. Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram
remain inaccessible to this state of mind.
Marshall McLuhan
