Top 52 Simple Poetry Quotes
#1. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.
G.K. Chesterton
#2. A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.
Jane Hirshfield
#3. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me - yet - the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
Margaret Atwood
#4. I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter ... '
Gary Oldman
#5. The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
Edward Hirsch
#6. you wanted it all to make sense
and you wanted the most complicated answer,
but the answer is simple.
just be.
AVA.
#7. Give me
a moon-blanket night
to keep me warm
a long-gone smile
to comfort me
a pair of rain-blue eyes
to haunt me
a simple soul
...to love me.
Sanober Khan
#8. I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
Boris Pasternak
#9. The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know. If from time to time we hear the opposite, then those are just trivial religious and poetical exaggerations and ridiculous rumors, which have nothing to do with the real circumstances of the simple dead.
Hassan Blasim
#10. That your power of command
with simple language was
one of the magnificent things of
our century.
(from the poem: result)
Charles Bukowski
#11. There is to me a daintiness about early flowers that touches me like poetry. They blow out with such a simple loveliness among the common herbs of pastures, and breathe their lives so unobtrusively, like hearts whose beatings are too gentle for the world.
Nathaniel Parker Willis
#12. Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.
Emma Lazarus
#13. Ornate rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato ... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.
John Milton
#15. Only good poets cure us of an overindulgence in words. Only simple essential food cures us of gluttony.
Hector Abad Faciolince
#16. Mediocre prose might be read as an escape, might be spoken on television by actors, or mouthed in movies. But mediocre poetry did not exist at all. If poetry wasn't good, it wasn't poetry. It was that simple.
Erica Jong
#17. My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.
Jean Cocteau
#18. For the beginning is assuredly
the end- since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.
William Carlos Williams
#20. So beautiful but so bountiful.
So delicate but so fresh.
So magical but so simple.
So much to say but yet so silent.
So loving and so pleasant.
Oh, flowers of charming love,
You are life's joy and present.
Debasish Mridha
#21. There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.
Terry Brooks
#22. Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
Philip Larkin
#24. How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.
Billy Cannon
#25. The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest - Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast.
William Wordsworth
#26. My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
James Fenton
#27. Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.
Paul A.M. Dirac
#29. Moments caught in time. Simple memories spread out before me. Timeless reminders of how life goes on, even when it feels as if you cannot.
Jay Long
#30. To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
John Ciardi
#31. I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
Billy Collins
#32. Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.
Joan Didion
#33. A person who wants a pure and simple life can start a war within themselves and with society
Lisa C. Miller
#34. Poetry is simple when you write what you see and feel, searching for the words only makes it difficult
Rayvon L. Browne
#35. Here is the simple truth about people: Love the ones you want to keep.
Pleasefindthis
#36. Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#38. Poetry as Initiation
Every poem embraces our passion to connect
its reader to snippets of knowledge
that have become life-giving to us.
Poems go beyond simple sharing to initiation,
beyond the need to express
to the urgency to edify.
Beryl Dov
#39. We don't always get the answers we want, sometimes a simple look can haunt us enough to know some ghosts need their rest.
Shane Koyczan
#41. I hate seeing poetry in everything I touch. I hate that I can no longer love you without turning you into a metaphor - that it can never be simple as looking at you and saying yes, yes, yes.
Shinji Moon
#42. All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#43. Her touch is like doing simple math
When she sleeps in the bed, subtracting clothes
There is a red ink, like a sparkling red wine, adding colors
Dividing body, remembering gods, without multiplying
Santosh Kalwar
#44. I have only one simple question for Hello Poetry Members who are following other poets but deliberately choose not to follow me... [10w]
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU FOLLOWING POETS
MUCH LESS CREATIVE?
Beryl Dov
#45. Oh happy day! A day to make a hay! And when it is mid-day, think about the day! And when you think about the day, don't forget the hay! Oh happy day! A day to make a hay!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#47. Poet
To mask the fiery thought,
in simple words succeeds.
For still the craft of genius is,
To mask a king in weeds
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. The music that really moves me is music that's written by people where there isn't a lot of money and they're really singing with just their voice and a guitar about their feelings and about their life. Their poetry is relatively simple, in the sense that it's about their soul in jeopardy.
Anton Yelchin
#50. Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
Henry James
#51. To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple.
Dejan Stojanovic
