Top 100 Quotes About What Is Poetry
#1. What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Czeslaw Milosz
#2. Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little?
Mark Strand
#3. The bacillus of efficiency has also attacked football, and some dare to ask what's the point in playing well. I feel tempted to tell about the time they dared to ask Borges what is poetry for, to which he answered: 'What is a sunrise for? What are caresses for? What is the smell of coffee for?'
Jorge Valdano
#4. What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?
David Eugene Smith
#5. What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
John Ruskin
#6. There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.
Henry David Thoreau
#7. I will tell you what is poetry ...
It is a remote electronic claw picking up a stuffed bunny rabbit ...
Chelsey Minnis
#8. Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Samuel Johnson
#9. What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.
Elizabeth Smart
#10. If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'
A.R. Ammons
#11. What is poetry? you ask, while fixing your blue pupil on mine.
What is poetry! And you are asking me?
Poetry ... is you.
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
#12. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde
#13. 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
#14. The problem with love is not what we feel but what we wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel something.
Nikki Giovanni
#15. 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
#16. History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
Aristotle.
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth
Mary Jo Bang
#20. When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what
did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed
a noun.
Gertrude Stein
#21. Poetry is what you can't translate. Art is what you can't define. Film is what you can't explain. But we're going to try, anyway.
James Monaco
#22. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#23. That is what you meant to me: a light that shone through the darkness. (Your smile, p. 56)
Chimnese Davids
#24. What exists in this heart is not imaginary. This hand would not grasp air in trying to hold you, nor this eye blind itself in searching for you in vain.
Chrissy Moon
#25. Everything is an echo of something I once read.
Dream, hope, and celebrate life!
Love always comes back in a song.
One thing we all have in common is a love for food and drink.
Memories never die, and dreams never end!
What is time?
John Siwicki
#26. In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.
Patrick Kavanagh
#27. What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.
Erica Jong
#28. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
Charles Bukowski
#29. Look! Why want anything more marvellous than what is.
Diana Athill
#30. That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry - poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow
Anne Sexton
#31. Poetry can bridge that gap between what is solid and what is suggested; poetry can pull cogent meaning from the veiled truths outside of reason's grasp.
Bryant McGill
#32. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#33. 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.
Diane Wakoski
#34. you say you often feel this madness. what do you do when it comes upon you?
I write poetry.
is poetry madness?
non-poetry is madness.
what is madness?
madness is ugliness.
what is ugly?
to each man, something different.
Charles Bukowski
#35. Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
Robert Morgan
#36.
Who knows what death, anxiety of the living,
Who knows what loneliness, end of the loving
I could say to myself of the love (I had):
Let it not be immortal, since it is flame
But let it be infinite while it lasts.
Vinicius De Moraes
#37. 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.
J.M. Coetzee
#38. A poem often begins in the midst of wonderful wandering thoughts that are eager to open wings to fly in the beautiful blue sky of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#39. 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
#40. Kill what you can't save
what you can't eat throw out
what you can't throw out bury
What you can't bury give away
what you can't give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought.
Margaret Atwood
#42. Take your materials from what is around you - if you see a dandelion, write about that; if it's misty, write about the mist. The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion.
Masaoka Shiki
#43. Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.
Czeslaw Milosz
#44. Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Antonin Artaud
#45. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#46. It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.
Helen Bevington
#47. Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That's what I was looking for.
Allen Ginsberg
#48. 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!'
Jill Scott
#49. Poetry is simple when you write what you see and feel, searching for the words only makes it difficult
Rayvon L. Browne
#50. 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
#51. No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.
Knut Hamsun
#52. He taught me to be a Da Vinci
and I sit here, with his portraits
waiting for him to return
I do not think he will
Is that what it means to be human
to be all powerful,
to build a temple to yourself
and leave
only the walls to pray
Phil Kaye
#53. What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Marianne Moore
#54. It was her laughter that made me love her. Her shy inappropriate madness is what made her beautiful.
Jay Long
#55. I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
Gary Shteyngart
#56. SAY EXACTLY
what you think
until you find that
no one is listening
then say
something else
Chocolate Waters
#57. I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
Rita Dove
#58. The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs & convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than what these words designate.
Octavio Paz
#59. If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell
#60. Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.
Diane Wakoski
#61. Ive realized that even more that what is beautiful about the accordion is to play with a single finger sometimes, with a very pure, very pointed sound that gives a lot of poetry and emotion.
Richard Galliano
#62. Think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
#63. We fall into the old stuff of textuality, and almost everything becomes safe because nobody wants to talk about what is not safe in poetry. We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine.
Fady Joudah
#64. Like a wildflower, poetry does not need explanation. It only needs to touch our emotions.
Debasish Mridha
#65. She's an irritating, opinionated woman, a type Buddy can't stand. I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person, deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things.
J.D. Salinger
#66. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#67. Poetry has its own unique language which every mind translates differently according to their own personal view.
Debasish Mridha
#68. Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
#69. The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#70. Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
Rita Dove
#71. holding
the evening
tremblingly close
to me
i weep
into
the sun
letting
the burden
of hope
lift off my chest
i realize
this is what
it means
to be free.
Sanober Khan
#72. What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.
Theodore Roethke
#73. She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.
Louis Untermeyer
#74. since the hardships of life is what has made me strong, instead of living with regrets--I'm thankful for what went wrong
Jason Frisby
#75. Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall.
Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen
#77. What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe
James Dickey
#78. Our desire to say more grows bigger and what to say about it, except that saying is not always about saying, growing is not always about growing.
Dejan Stojanovic
#79. What can be explained is not poetry.
W.B.Yeats
#80. I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?
Sylvia Plath
#81. What is this slow blue dream of living,
and this fevered death by dreaming?
Aberjhani
#82. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
Edward Hirsch
#84. What I want to know is how you go on when you look around
and don't see anywhere you want to go without the only person
you can't have.
Charlotte Eriksson
#85. It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment
that explodes in poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#86. Poetry! Indeed, verses are the only thing that your letter lacks, Makar Alexievitch. And what tender feelings I can read in it - what roseate-coloured fancies! To the curtain, however, I had never given a thought. The fact is that when I moved the flower-pots, it LOOPED ITSELF up. There now!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#87. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg
#88. For if our bodies aren't our own,
And justice isn't ours,
And our love is just a sin,
And voices by the people
Are no longer for the people,
What have we left to lose?
Phar West Nagle
#89. In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
Mark Strand
#90. What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth fire and the home acre
To go with that old grey widow-maker?
Rudyard Kipling
#91. Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.
Dejan Stojanovic
#92. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
#93. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
#94. People speak generally of a plain style and an elaborate style. I think this is wrong, because what is important ... is that poetry should be living ...
Jorge Luis Borges
#95. Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart.
Trent Zelazny
#96. Poetry is an art of telling the poet's own truth my bending and twisting it with his or her own emotional bulldozer.
Debasish Mridha
#97. The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.
Edward Hirsch
#98. We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.
T. S. Eliot
#99. The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and what it is.
Paul Valery
#100. What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.
Fernand Leger
