Poetry Quotes
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“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
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“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.”
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“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
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“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
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“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
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“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”
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“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
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“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.”
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“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”
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“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
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“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
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“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”
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“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”
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“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.”
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“What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”
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“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
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“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
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“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.”
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“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.”
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“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
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“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”
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“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”
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“It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.”
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“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
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“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”
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“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”
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“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
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“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”
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“I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.”
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“The moment of change is the only poem.”
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“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.”
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“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
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“Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.”
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“God is the perfect poet.”
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“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.”
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“The crown of literature is poetry.”
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“Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.”
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“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”
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“No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.”
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“Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.”
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“You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.”
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“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.”
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“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”
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“Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.”
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“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
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“A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”
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“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.”
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“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”
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“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.”
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“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”
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“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”
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“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
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“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
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“'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.”
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“Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.”
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“One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.”
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“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.”
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“Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.”
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“I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.”
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“You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”
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“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”
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“He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.”
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“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
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“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.”
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“To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.”
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“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.”
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“There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.”
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“Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”
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“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”
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“Poetry is the deification of reality.”
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“A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.”
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“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
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“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
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“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
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“Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.”
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“The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”
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“If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.”
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“You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.”
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“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
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“The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.”
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“How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.”
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“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.”
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“Every single soul is a poem.”
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“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”
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“Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.”
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“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
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“Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
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“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”
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“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
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“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”
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“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
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“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”
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“A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.”
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“I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.”
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“Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
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“Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.”
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“Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.”
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“Poetry lies its way to the truth.”
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“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”
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“Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.”
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“The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.”
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“Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.”
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“I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.”
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“One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.”
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“The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.”
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“I like poems that are little games.”
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“However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.”
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“You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.”
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“Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.”
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“Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.”
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“The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.”
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“No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?”
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“There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.”
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“The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.”
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“A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.”
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“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”
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“Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.”
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“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”
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“Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.”
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“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there… Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
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“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.”
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“Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it's always been the language of bridges.”
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“The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”
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“Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.”
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“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
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“To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.”
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“I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”
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“Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!”
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“Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.”
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“Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.”
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“Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.”
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“Dancing is the poetry of the foot.”
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“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.”
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“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
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“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.”
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“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
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“Wine is bottled poetry.”
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“Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.”
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“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”
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“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.”
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“The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.”
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“To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.”
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“You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.”
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“Personality is everything in art and poetry.”
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“The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.”
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“Poetry must be made by all and not by one.”
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“A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.”
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“Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.”
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“Why should poetry have to make sense?”
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“Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.”
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“Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.”
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“I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.”
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“Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.”
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“From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.”
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“Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.”
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“Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.”
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“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.”
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“In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.”
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“The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.”
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“Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.”
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“In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.”
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“Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.”
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“Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.”
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“Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.”
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“If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry… thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”
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“When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”
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“The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.”
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“How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?”
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“Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.”
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“I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.”
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“Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.”
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“I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.”
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“The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.”
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“I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.”
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“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.”
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“Love is the poetry of the senses.”
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“I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.”
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“Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.”
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“When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.”
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“I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.”
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“In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.”
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“Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.”
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“The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.”
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“I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”
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“We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.”
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“Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.”
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“There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.”
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“Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.”
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“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.”
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“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
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“However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.”
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“Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.”
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“As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.”
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“Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives.”
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“Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.”
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“Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.”
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“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
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“I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.”
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“Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.”
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“Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.”
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“At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.”
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“I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.”
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“There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.”
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“As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.”
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“Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.”
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“The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.”
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“The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.”
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“Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.”
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“We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.”
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“Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.”
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“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”
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“Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
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“Money is a kind of poetry.”
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“Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.”
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“Making love is, simply put, poetry in motion.”
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“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
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“Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.”
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“History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.”
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“I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.”
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“Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.”
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“There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.”
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“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.”
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“Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.”
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“I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.”
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“Poetry is meant to be heard.”
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“A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.”
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“Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?”
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“Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.”
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“If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”
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“It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.”
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“I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.”
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“Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.”
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“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
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“Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.”
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“Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.”
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“In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.”
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“A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.”
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“Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.”
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“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.”
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“Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.”
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“The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.”
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“I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.”
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“Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.”
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“If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.”
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“I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.”
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“For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.”
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“In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.”
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“You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I've decided to create stories through video games.”
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“I write poetry, and I put it to a beat - I mean, that's what they call rap.”
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“Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.”
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“Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.”
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“Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.”
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“Ever since I was a kid, I've always been interested in the poetry of melancholy, if you like.”
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“For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.”
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“Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.”
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“Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.”
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“America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?”
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“To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.”
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“I love films. I love music. I love poetry and stories. All of that I feel… I sort of get very excited and fed by.”
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“I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 … there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'”
-
“Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.”
-
“Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.”
-
“Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.”
-
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”
-
“Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.”
-
“It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.”
-
“'Sunshine Superman' was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.”
-
“I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.”
-
“You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.”
-
“Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.”
-
“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”
-
“In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.”
-
“The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.”
-
“Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.”
-
“If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.”
-
“I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.”
-
“Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.”
-
“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.”
-
“It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.”
-
“Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.”
-
“It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”
-
“I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don't rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that's why I do not like him.”
-
“What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.”
-
“I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.”
-
“Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.”
-
“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”
-
“As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.”
-
“The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.”
-
“Poetry is life distilled.”
-
“I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.”
-
“I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.”
-
“Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.”
-
“For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.”
-
“I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.”
-
“I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.”
-
“A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.”
-
“My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.”
-
“The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.”
-
“I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.”
-
“Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.”
-
“Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.”
-
“From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.”
-
“The Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. This was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own: it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round.”
-
“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”
-
“Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.”
-
“I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.”
-
“Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.”
-
“When I get depressed, I try to get something for the terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry.”
-
“Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.”
-
“I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.”
-
“I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.”
-
“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
-
“One: whose shoulders do you stand on? And two: what do you stand for? These are two questions that I always begin my poetry workshops with students because at times, poetry can seem like this dead art form for old white men who just seem like they were born to be old, like, you know, Benjamin Button or something.”
-
“In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.”
-
“On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.”
-
“In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.”
-
“I'm a lousy writer, and it shows when I try to write poetry.”
-
“Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.”
-
“I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.”
-
“Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.”
-
“I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I've heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who's good and who's not. It's like the word 'lyrical' - 'lyrical' is the worst word in the entire world.”
-
“The flame that is naturally clear always gives the most light and heat. If I could blend my talent for poetry and music into one, the light would burn still clearer, and I might go far.”
-
“You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light.”
-
“With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.”
-
“Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.”
-
“Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.”
-
“Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.”
-
“I was a very creative child. I played the saxophone and piano, and I was always writing poetry and stories, or drawing in my notebook. I just tried to express myself through as many creative outlets as possible. And in high school, I started to get really into photography and videography and would spend hours working on it.”
-
“I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.”
-
“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.”
-
“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”
-
“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”
-
“Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.”
-
“The reason people get afraid of writing real, honest journalism and fiction, and the reason corrupted people and demagogues are afraid of journalism and fiction and poetry across the world, is because it is a subversive form.”
-
“Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.”
-
“I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.”
-
“Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.”
-
“My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.”
-
“Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.”
-
“The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.”
-
“Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.”
-
“Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.”
-
“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.”
-
“Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.”
-
“I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.”
-
“Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.”
-
“I see poetry as spiritual medicine.”
-
“Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.”
-
“Poetry is all nouns and verbs.”
-
“I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.”
-
“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.”
-
“My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.”
-
“I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.”
-
“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.”
-
“I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.”
-
“Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.”
-
“I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.”
-
“It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.”
-
“Poetry is - it's an art form, but, to me, it's also a weapon, it's also an instrument. It's the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that's a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.”
-
“Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”
-
“I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.”
-
“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.”
-
“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”
-
“There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.”
-
“Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.”
-
“Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.”
-
“My parents were willing to let me follow my nose, do what I wanted to do, and they supported my interest by buying the books that I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, almost always poetry books.”
-
“The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.”
-
“On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.”
-
“The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.”
-
“I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.”
-
“I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.”
-
“I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.”
-
“Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.”
-
“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”
-
“It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.”
-
“If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.”
-
“Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”
-
“The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.”
-
“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”
-
“The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.”
-
“I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.”
-
“On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.”
-
“There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.”
-
“Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.”
-
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
-
“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.”
-
“As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.”
-
“I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.”
-
“I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.”
-
“If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.”
-
“Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.”
-
“I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.”
-
“The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”
-
“I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.”
-
“Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.”
-
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
-
“All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.”
-
“I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.”
-
“When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'”
-
“The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?”
-
“All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.”
-
“I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.”
-
“For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.”
-
“Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.”
-
“Love is poetry. To fall in love with a person is like understanding a deep, moving poem. Noticing every little detail. To see what the poet shows, to smell what he describes and the urge to taste the intangible.”
-
“Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does. People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe.”
-
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.”
-
“As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.”
-
“I love romantic poetry.”
-
“As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.”
-
“I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.”
-
“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.”
-
“You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.”
-
“Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.”
-
“I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.”
-
“In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.”
-
“If I don't write down a thought - or an image or a line of poetry - the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen.”
-
“I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.”
-
“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”
-
“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.”
-
“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.”
-
“There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.”
-
“With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.”
-
“In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.”
-
“I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.”
-
“Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.”
-
“A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.”
-
“Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.”
-
“Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.”
-
“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.”
-
“Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.”
-
“Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”
-
“People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.”
-
“I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.”
-
“Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.”
-
“I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.”
-
“Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.”
-
“The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it.”
-
“By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.”
-
“Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.”
-
“I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.”
-
“Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it's this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.”
-
“Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.”
-
“One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.”
-
“There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.”
-
“Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.”
-
“I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.”
-
“I don't shape trends, I'd say. I merely reflect them. I think the emphasis is on 'them.' I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.”
-
“There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.”
-
“I read poetry to save time.”
-
“There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.”
-
“I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.”
-
“Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.”
-
“I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination?”
-
“Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that's how I always try to start my thoughts.”
-
“I would like to spend more time with Spanish poetry. I know French better than Spanish, but Spanish was my first language, and my father spoke it to us.”
-
“There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.”
-
“Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.”
-
“To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.”
-
“Lizzie Magie was a pretty astonishing woman. She was an outspoken feminist, she had acted, she had done some performing, she had written some poetry, and she was a game designer.”
-
“The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.”
-
“Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.”
-
“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”
-
“Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.”
-
“It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”
-
“Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint… Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.”
-
“I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.”
-
“I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.”
-
“Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.”
-
“Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.”
-
“I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.”
-
“Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.”
-
“Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.”
-
“I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.”
-
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
-
“I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.”
-
“Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.”
-
“Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.”
-
“When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, 'You should switch this over to rapping.' I went home and did that - started putting my poems over rap.”
-
“I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.”
-
“The Scottish Highlands are incredible. There seems to be magic and poetry everywhere.”
-
“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.'”
-
“But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.”
-
“I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.”
-
“Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.”
-
“In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief.”
-
“I'm not a rock star writing poetry. I don't feel like a rock star and I don't know what one is, actually. I'm a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.”
-
“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.”
-
“Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.”
-
“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”
-
“Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.”
-
“We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.”
-
“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
-
“Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.”
-
“Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.”
-
“It's not easy to define poetry.”
-
“Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.”
-
“I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don't affect your work.”
-
“For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one's poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.”
-
“Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.”
-
“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”
-
“Only those ignorant of what poetry means will ask the question: what is it good for?”
-
“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.”
-
“A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.”
-
“Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.”
-
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
-
“I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.”
-
“People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.”
-
“In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.”
-
“For me, when I started writing, it was mostly poetry. And poetry is very visual. I feel the same way about the way that I approach direction. There might be a theme within the visuals that you're choosing that people don't consciously pick up on, but that they feel.”
-
“I went to what can only be described as a slum school in Salford - rough and full of trainee punks - but I was very lucky in that I had one inspiring teacher, John Malone, who gave the whole class an interest in romantic poetry.”
-
“Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.”
-
“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.”
-
“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”
-
“Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.”
-
“The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.”
-
“Superstition is the poetry of life.”
-
“People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.”
-
“Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.”
-
“I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah's 'Black Reign' is the album that stands out the most.”
-
“Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes… whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they're listening to poetry.”
-
“Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.”
-
“Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.”
-
“Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'”
-
“Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.”
-
“In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!”
-
“Around 10 years old I started being into church and being around the church. I started doing poetry - I was doing all clean poetry, totally clean.”
-
“I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.”
-
“The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.”
-
“Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.”
-
“The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.”
-
“When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.”
-
“You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.”
-
“Bottom line, I have to follow what my soul says, or my spirit. And my spirit said that poetry and the arts should be without borders, should be without political borders.”
-
“The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.”
-
“Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.”
-
“The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.”
-
“In school I was sidelined by Tamil language teachers. But in the film industry, I got interested in Tamil poetry after reading and working with the Vairamuthu.”
-
“On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.”
-
“I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.”
-
“If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.”
-
“Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.”
-
“I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.”
-
“He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.”
-
“I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.”
-
“I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.”
-
“Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.”
-
“It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.”
-
“I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.”
-
“In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.”
-
“I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.”
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“Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.”
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“It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.”
-
“I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.”
-
“I did not move into developing or processing color. I stayed with black and white. I still think to this day that I prefer to work in black and white if it has to do with poetry or anything other than specific reality. I have worked in color when I thought it was the appropriate way to express the thought that I was working on.”
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“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.”
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“I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.”
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“If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”
-
“All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter.”
-
“In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.”
-
“I used to do poetry in elementary school. I used to just write.”
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“I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.”
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“I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.”
-
“It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.”
-
“You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.”
-
“The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.”
-
“I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.”
-
“Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.”
-
“Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.”
-
“I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.”
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“There's a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that's a bit blurred in my mind.”
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“All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.”
-
“So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.”
-
“I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.”
-
“I would give anything to sing like Beyonce or Adele. I've said many times to my friends that if I could sing like them, I would give up poetry and writing.”
-
“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”
-
“Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.”
-
“I was writing since I can remember - I just didn't know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.”
-
“Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.”
-
“The cliche is dead poetry.”
-
“The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.”
-
“It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.”
-
“I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.”
-
“There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.”
-
“Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.”
-
“Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.”
-
“She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.”
-
“The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”
-
“One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.”
-
“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”
-
“Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.”
-
“Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.”
-
“Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.”
-
“Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.”
-
“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.”
-
“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.”
-
“Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.”
-
“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”
-
“Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.”
-
“I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.”
-
“Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.”
-
“The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.”
-
“The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.”
-
“Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.”
-
“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”
-
“The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.”
-
“When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.”
-
“Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.”
-
“Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.”
-
“If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”
-
“In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.”
-
“Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.”
-
“I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.”
-
“What is poetry which does not save nations or people?”
-
“With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.”
-
“For me, poetry is always a search for order.”
-
“The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.”
-
“Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.”
-
“I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.”
-
“Eloquence is the poetry of prose.”
-
“The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.”
-
“I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.”
-
“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.”
-
“All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.”
-
“Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.”
-
“I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.”
-
“I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.”
-
“Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.”
-
“Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.”
-
“I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.”
-
“I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.”
-
“Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.”
-
“I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.”
-
“So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.”
-
“My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.”
-
“Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly… in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.”
-
“Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.”
-
“As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.”
-
“I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.”
-
“I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.”
-
“I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.”
-
“I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.”
-
“Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.”
-
“I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”
-
“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”
-
“What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.”
-
“I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.”
-
“Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.”
-
“Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.”
-
“Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.”
-
“There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.”
-
“When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.”
-
“So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.”
-
“My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.”
-
“I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.”
-
“Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.”
-
“Poetry is composing for the breath.”
-
“Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.”
-
“Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.”
-
“Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.”
-
“They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.”
-
“The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.”
-
“But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.”
-
“And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.”
-
“But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.”
-
“There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.”
-
“It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.”
-
“I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.”
-
“The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.”
-
“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.”
-
“Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.”
-
“My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.”
-
“I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.”
-
“I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.”
-
“I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.”
-
“I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.”
-
“The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?”
-
“And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.”
-
“I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.”
-
“I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.”
-
“But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.”
-
“My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.”
-
“I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.”
-
“I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.”
-
“I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.”
-
“I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.”
-
“Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.”
-
“We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.”
-
“There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.”
-
“I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.”
-
“When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.”
-
“I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.”
-
“Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.”
-
“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.”
-
“Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.”
-
“When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.”
-
“That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.”
-
“Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.”
-
“I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.”
-
“Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.”
-
“When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.”
-
“For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.”
-
“That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.”
-
“The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.”
-
“We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.”
-
“That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.”
-
“Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.”
-
“I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.”
-
“I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.”
-
“Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.”
-
“If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.”
-
“At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry… stuff that we like. It's fun.”
-
“There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.”
-
“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.”
-
“I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.”
-
“I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.”
-
“My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.”
-
“Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.”
-
“I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.”
-
“All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.”
-
“I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.”
-
“I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.”
-
“I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.”
-
“I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.”
-
“I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.”
-
“Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.”
-
“It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?”
-
“We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.”
-
“When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.”
-
“The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.”
-
“I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.”
-
“I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.”
-
“An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.”
-
“Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.”
-
“In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.”
-
“If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.”
-
“My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.”
-
“I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.”
-
“Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.”
-
“Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.”
-
“I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.”
-
“The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.”
-
“Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.”
-
“I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.”
-
“I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.”
-
“Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.”
-
“You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.”
-
“The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.”
-
“Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.”
-
“The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.”
-
“Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.”
-
“Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.”
-
“The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.”
-
“Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.”
-
“I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.”
-
“I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”
-
“Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.”
-
“I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.”
-
“I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.”
-
“One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.”
-
“A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.”
-
“The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.”
-
“What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.”
-
“If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.”
-
“The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.”
-
“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.”
-
“The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.”
-
“I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.”
-
“Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.”
-
“In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.”
-
“The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.”
-
“For me, prose walks, poetry dances.”
-
“My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.”
-
“Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.”
-
“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.”
-
“A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.”
-
“That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.”
-
“Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.”
-
“Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.”
-
“I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.”
-
“A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.”
-
“Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.”
-
“My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.”
-
“There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.”
-
“A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.”
-
“Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.”
-
“But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.”
-
“For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.”
-
“If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.”
-
“It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.”
-
“Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.”
-
“So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.”
-
“The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.”
-
“To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.”
-
“We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.”
-
“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.”
-
“Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.”
-
“I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.”
-
“There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.”
-
“The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.”
-
“Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.”
-
“I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.”
-
“But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.”
-
“For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.”
-
“However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.”
-
“Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.”
-
“Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.”
-
“Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.”
-
“There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.”
-
“This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.”
-
“True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.”
-
“It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.”
-
“The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.”
-
“I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.”
-
“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.”
-
“But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.”
-
“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.”
-
“But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.”
-
“By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.”
-
“Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.”
-
“If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.”
-
“Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.”
-
“That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.”
-
“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.”
-
“Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.”
-
“With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.”
-
“Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.”
-
“And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.”
-
“Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.”
-
“American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.”
-
“But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.”
-
“But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.”
-
“High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.”
-
“I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.”
-
“Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.”
-
“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.”
-
“I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.”
-
“I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.”
-
“PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.”
-
“Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.”
-
“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.”
-
“I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.”
-
“I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.”
-
“I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.”
-
“I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.”
-
“In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.”
-
“Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.”
-
“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.”
-
“All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.”
-
“And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.”
-
“And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.”
-
“I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.”
-
“I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.”
-
“In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.”
-
“When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.”
-
“The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.”
-
“A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.”
-
“What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.”
-
“I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.”
-
“There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.”
-
“How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.”
-
“Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.”
-
“Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.”
-
“My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.”
-
“Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.”
-
“Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.”
-
“I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.”
-
“I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.”
-
“I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.”
-
“And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.”
-
“And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.”
-
“A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.”
-
“A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.”
-
“I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.”
-
“Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.”
-
“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.”
-
“There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.”
-
“I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.”
-
“The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.”
-
“And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.”
-
“So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.”
-
“We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.”
-
“Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.”
-
“I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.”
-
“Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.”
-
“In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.”
-
“Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.”
-
“I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.”
-
“I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.”
-
“Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.”
-
“Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.”
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“While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.”
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“I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.”
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“I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.”
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“A lot happens by accident in poetry.”
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“I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.”
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“I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.”
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“As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.”
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“Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.”
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“For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.”
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“But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.”
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“But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.”
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“Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.”
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“Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.”
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“I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.”
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“It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.”
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“Poetry and prayer are very similar.”
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“For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.”
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“Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.”
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“Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.”
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“I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.”
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“Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.”
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“Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.”
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“Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.”
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“I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.”
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“I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.”
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“Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.”
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“Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.”
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“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
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“Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.”
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“Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.”
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“Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.”
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“Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.”
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“I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.”
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“Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.”
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“The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.”
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“Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.”
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“Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.”
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“Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.”
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“Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.”
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“Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.”
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“Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.”
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“I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.”
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“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”
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“I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.”
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“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.”
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“Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.”
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“Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.”
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“Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.”
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“A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.”
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“There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.”
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“That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.”
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“One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.”
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“For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.”
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“Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.”
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“Prose talks and poetry sings.”
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“One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.”
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“He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.”
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“Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.”
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“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”
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“There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.”
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“Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.”
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“Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.”
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“Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.”
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“There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.”
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“The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.”
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“I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.”
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“Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.”
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“France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.”
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“Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.”
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“The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.”
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“If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.”
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“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
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“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.”
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“To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.”
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“Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.”
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“Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.”
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“The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.”
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“Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.”
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“The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.”
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“Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.”
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“The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.”
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“I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'”
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“Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.”
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“That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.”
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“Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.”
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“I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.”
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“I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.”
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“I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.”
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“The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.”
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“Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.”
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“I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.”
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“Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!”
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“More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.”
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“I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.”
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“Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.”
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“I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.”
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“Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.”
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“In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.”
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“You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.”
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“I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.”
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“It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.”
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“I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.”
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“I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.”
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“I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.”
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“I do actually dabble in a bit of poetry! And I'm yet to pen a script, but it is something that I've been telling myself I want to do.”
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“You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.”
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“Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.”
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“Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.”