Quotes About Poetry

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.

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.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.

While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.

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.

Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.

I was deeply moved by Richard Blanco's reading of his inaugural poem-a timely and elegant tribute to the great diversity of American experience. And now comes this fine meditation on his experience of coming to poetry, of making the poem and the months surrounding its making-a testament to the strength and significance of poetry in American culture, something not always seen or easily measured. Today Is For All of Us, One Today is a necessary intervention into the ongoing conversation about the role of poetry in public life.

Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

I don't think I ever had a morning where I woke up and said I'm going to be a professional poet. I know I've always loved poetry, I've always loved writing poetry and I've always loved sharing poetry. I've also always known that I wanted that to somehow be a very large part of my life and I'm very fortunate that it's such a large part of my life.

He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.

'Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?' 'I read it in a book,' said Alice. 'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much easier than that, by - Tweedledee, I think it was.' 'As to poetry, you know,' said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, 'I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that - ' 'Oh, it needn't come to that!' Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning.

My erotic poetry is not poetry that uses vernacular words. It is a very erotic poetry, but I never use anything, for example, that is not in the dictionary. I don't like to be ugly, I seek out what is beautiful, and if my great search is for freedom and beauty, I can't be vulgar, ordinary.

Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry.

I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition - there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry - both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

Thinking in prose is different. I gained an immense amount of respect for people who write prose, and also felt even more sure that the thinking particular to poetry is essential to my life. I need to think, to explore, to question, in poetry. Without that feeling, I am, in some ultimate way, lost.

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.

You may ... make a little recreation of poetry, in the midst of your painful studies. Nevertheless, I cannot but advise you. Withhold thy throat from thirst. Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. ... let not the Circean cup intoxicate you.

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.

It is absurd and anti-life to be 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.

Poets are political, they have to be reflections of their times [because] they're living in their times... Poetry is political in that it's standing in opposition to fascism. Good poetry asks a bunch of questions and asks the audience to interact with themselves or see themselves in it; maybe you like it or you don't like it. But the fascist sort of stuff plays on your fears and tells you to jump on the party line and gives some simple excuses - blame this person.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

I'll say that this is probably the best time for poetry since the T'ang dynasty. All the rest of the world is going to school on American poetry in the twentieth century, from Ezra Pound to W. S. Merwin, and for very good reason. We have soaked up influence in the last century like a sponge. It's cross-pollination, first law of biology, that the more variety you have the more health you have.

I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called "silent poetry," and poetry "speaking painting." The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other.

Poetry, in the entire course of its development, has always been trying to capture meanings and problems which are still obscure and dormant. Poetry tries to awaken them with a kiss, wherever they may be: in the air, in things, in human beings.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age.

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

we are far too used to the assumption that poetry and poets will be there when we want them, no matter how long they have been ignored, taken for granted, misused. After all, isn't poetry a form of prophecy, and aren't prophets known for their talent for flourishing in inhospitable deserts and other bleak surroundings? Maybe. But maybe not indefinitely.

It’s never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it’s kind of unkillable, poetry. It’s our most ancient artform and I think it’s more relevant today than ever, because it’s one person saying what they really believe.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality... If poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you - nobody else - who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else... There's the artist's responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

Durable, memorable poetry is usually alert to complexity. A really good poem gives you a reason to read it 20 times, because the language in a good poem is doing a lot of work emotionally and a lot of work intellectually. That means durable poetry can help us think about complexity, can help us resist easy answers and help us step back. And it can help us sometimes calm down, and sometimes it can help us stay upset.

I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts.

There was engrained poetry and then when you look back at our history and in the 20th century, the last century, probably the greatest writers of the 20th century were Irish. It became our only weapon, was our poetry, our music.

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces-the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry.

I haven't been reading anything on tour so far, I haven't had a minute. Any moment that I've had recently on the tour has been completely sleeping. But before I left home I was reading Dylan Thomas' book of collected works of poetry. I read a lot of poetry.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

I love teaching poetry writing. Students come into the class thinking poetry has to be one way, then leave having created pieces that are wholly original, that have - quite literally - never been made before.