Bad Poetry Quotes

When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry ~ William Empson

The reason so much bad poetry is written is that it is written as poetry instead of concept. And the reason the public doesn't understand poetry is that there is nothing to understand, and the reason most poets write it is that they think they understand. Nothing is to be understood or "regained." It is simply to be written. By someone. Sometime. And not too often. ~ Charles Bukowski

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. ~ Jacques Derrida

We've had a deal of bad poetry, haven't we? Suggesting the climax to this thrilling and literary spectacle. The Olla Podrida, my sweet-hearts, will now be set on the fire. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Do good works or commission an opera house or just take it out and gaze at it longingly when you think of the handsome prince you might have made your own. For the record, I favor the latter option, preferably paired with copious tears and the recitation of bad poetry. ~ Leigh Bardugo

They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry. ~ Karl French

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose. ~ C.S. Lewis

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry. ~ Bertrand Russell

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. ~ Lena Dunham

Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet. ~ Charles Bukowski

Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. ~ Annie Dillard

Reading the very best writers - let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy - is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight. ~ Harold Bloom

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions. ~ Harold Bloom

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap. ~ Peter Steele

Mad Olia had a lot to say, and most of it was nonsensical, if it could be understood at all. Like bad poetry spoken underwater. ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

He didn't disagree with me, but he seemed to feel that I have a perfection complex of some kind. Much talk from him, and quite intelligent, on the virtues of living the imperfect life, of accepting one's own and others' weaknesses. I agree with him, but only in theory. I'll champion indiscrimination till doomsday, on the grounds that it leads to health and a kind of very real, enviable happiness. Followed purely it's the way of the Tao, and undoubtedly the highest way. But for a discriminating man to achieve this, it would mean that he would have to dispossess himself of poetry, go beyond poetry. That is, he couldn't possibly learn or drive himself to like bad poetry in the abstract, let alone equate it with good poetry. He would have to drop poetry altogether. I said it would be no easy thing to do. Dr Sims said I was putting it too stringently – putting it, he said, as only a perfectionist would. ~ J.D. Salinger

Here is the last thing, and a shameful admission it is. When the all-father in eagle form had almost reached the vats, with Suttung immediately behind him, Odin blew some of the mead out of his behind, a splatter wet fart of foul-smelling mead right in Suttung's face, blinding the giant and throwing him off Odin's trail.

No one, then or now, wanted to drink the mead that came out of Odin's ass. But whenever you hear bad poets declaiming their bad poetry, filled with foolish similes and ugly rhymes, you will know which of the meads the have tasted. ~ Neil Gaiman

Through the rainbow he was brave,
Although blood, he did not crave.
But Vikings, blood they should want.
Heads as trophies, they should flaunt.
But from behind, little Jimmy was run through,
A puddle of blood grew and grew.
So when Jimmy fell,
My tears they did swell.
And I cried.
And I cried."

While there was scattered applause, most people just looked at him, confused. The poem was terrible. Heimdall knew it. The crowd knew it. ~ Dylan Callens

So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example:
I love you
You love me
Thank God for that
I'm so happy
And Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on):
Otter! Otter! Otter!
Don't lead cows to slaughter
I love you and I know
I should've told you soon-a
But you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna!
TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear. ~ T.J. Klune

The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

What did you expect? That he'd send you flowers and write you bad poetry? That dead Nemean prowler is pretty much as close to a stuffed animal as you're ever going to get from a Spartan like Logan Quinn. ~ Jennifer Estep

Poetry
even bad poetry
may be our final hope. ~ Edward Abbey

As if bad poetry could ever save anyone. ~ Sally Warner

Modern evangelicals like to compare holy things to soft drinks, designer clothes, [and other products in] our modern consumerist culture. The problem with this is not ... the comparison to a created thing. The problem is that it is ... bad poetry. The Bible compares God to very mundane things, but does so with poetic wonder. God shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth. ~ Douglas Wilson

When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. ~ Barack Obama

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad. ~ Peter Porter

To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form in order to express a feeling of disintegration, is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to "express" the loose and sprawling American continent. In fact, all feeling, if one gives oneself (that is, one's form) up to it, is a way of disintegration; poetic form is by definition a means to arrest the disintegration and order the feeling; and in so far as any poetry tends toward the formless, it fails to be expressive of anything. ~ Yvor Winters

So the women would not forgive. Their passion remained intact, carefully guarded and nurtured by the bitter knowledge of all they had lost, of all that had been stolen from them. For generations they vilified the Yankee race so the thief would have a face, a name, a mysterious country into which he had withdrawn and from which he might venture again. They banded together into a militant freemasonry of remembering, and from that citadel held out against any suggestion that what they had suffered and lost might have been in vain. They created the Lost Cause, and consecrated that proud fiction with the blood of real men. To the Lost Cause they dedicated their own blood, their own lives, and to it they offered books, monographs, songs, acres and acres of bad poetry. They fashioned out of grief and loss an imaginary world in which every Southern church had stabled Yankee horses, every nick in Mama's furniture was made by Yankee spurs, every torn painting was the victim of Yankee sabre - a world in which paint did not stick to plaster walls because of the precious salt once hidden there; in which bloodstains could not be washed away and every other house had been a hospital. ~ Howard Bahr

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic. ~ Oscar Wilde

If they succeed, you will not be packed off to some idyllic farm, where you can write bad poetry, we will both be executed. ~ A.H. Septimius

I hear you say: 'All that is not /fact/ : it is poetry'. Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

I'd also heard that humans were a life-form of, at best, middling intelligence and prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry, and walking around in circles. ~ Matt Haig

I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry. ~ Jonas Mekas

What could my mother be
to yours? What kin is my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever?
But in love
our hearts have mingled
like red earth and pouring rain. ~ Vikram Chandra

The whole journey of life has been broken down into bits: days! Day by day we live life! Day by day we live and leave something behind; something good or something bad! Something mediocre or something noble! Until you know how to use your day, you may end your days and ponder over your days; how you used them and how you wasted them! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor. ~ Christina Stead

Reading, at the deepest level, is a physical experience. Most people are not attuned to this, most people don't learn how to read - poetry for example, or high-quality prose. They're used to reading magazines and newspapers, which are only of the mind, but not of the body. ~ Paul Auster

I am more interested in the insecure transparency in you than the pretentious character. Naked is surreal, it may make you feel vulnerable for a while yet it will take us on a journey worth remembering. ~ Suchet Chaturvedi

Sarah felt like the bad girl in an eighties teen flick. The girl with big hair and a tight shirt who seduces the nice girl's boyfriend but loses him in the end, because she's shallow and tacky and no match for a sweet girl with good morals and freshly scrubbed skin. ~ Emily Maguire

The poetry of fashion lies in the creation of illusion ~ Coco Chanel

But 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. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be ~ John Donne

He smiled too, but did not hold her gaze. She watched as he put a few more pieces of wood on the fire, and wondered again who he was, who he really was. What happened to you? What could have been so bad? As she watched, she was struck by the undeniable sense that behind his introverted, self-effacing demeanor was a tireless mind churning with thought and memory, self-sustained like the constant machinations of a kinetic engine; and much like his two differently colored eyes, she also sensed that there were two just as different sides to him. ~ Sean J. Quirk

My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that. ~ Shaun Cassidy

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down. ~ Truman Capote

Love is a strange creature that no man can understand ~ Lisa C. Miller

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said. ~ Mel Brooks

I'm trying to take all the media attention with a grain of salt. It is nice, but you are never as great as people say you are. And you're never as bad as others say you are. ~ Kelly Olynyk

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career
my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker
she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

About that Hogwarts trip," I start.
His hand freezes on the doorknob.
"Lil ... " His voice is more serious. "You know it's not-"
I almost pounce on him to cover his mouth with my palm.
"Don't say it's not real."
It's just as bad as saying fairies aren't real. One of them will die as a result. We have to keep the faith. ~ Krista Ritchie

I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad - that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad - and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good - for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?
Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43 - why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate. ~ Norman Mailer

Poetry is fictionalised truth. ~ Sabne Raznik

You can do it even if everyone says you can't while your mind says you can. You cannot do it if your mind says you can't while everyone says you can! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

You think ghosts and witches and vampires and ghosts and two-headed monsters are bad. Why? Do you know what that is, David? It's prejudice. Racial prejudice! ~ Anthony Horowitz

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it. ~ Brian Jacques

I'd rather be an adviser. I don't wanna become a trainer because I think with the knowledge and the business sense that I've accomplished through my career and have credibility, why would I reduce myself down to being in a gym with a bunch of training which is not a bad thing to give advice, but I can do that with a suit and tie on and also be there when the cheques are written. I don't wanna be there when the cheques are handed down from 3 or 4 people's hands and then it hits mine as a trainer because 9/10 times, deductions have come out of that. ~ Bernard Hopkins

In 1952, I recited aloud for the first time, booming in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre from a bad poem that had won a prize. I was twenty-three. ~ Donald Hall

You might get some serial killers who are born with a chip missing, but for the most part I don't think anyone is born bad. ~ Benicio Del Toro

I pledge to do what must be done to get everyone before they get you, America. Free country or no free country, democracy or no democracy - at the end of the day, say what you want . . . You have to admit this: you're American. Naked displays of raw proactive bully-power put a tingling feeling in your undershorts. You like to see the bad guys get it. Might ~ Cintra Wilson

It was sad that she couldn't remember more. That was the problem with closing off so much of her past - sometimes the good memories went with the bad. ~ Kimberly McCreight

Like a wildflower, poetry does not need explanation. It only needs to touch our emotions. ~ Debasish Mridha

Bad choices almost always result from making a choice out of fear. ~ Jon Fitch

The good, the bad, the virgin, and the harlot: no one is spared, all go rose-spattered with plague lesions. I see no sense, no judgment before doom strikes. Death takes us all with the black malady or the sweating sickness, or the white blindness or the winter croup, or the crops failing or bitter water in our mouths. ~ Ned Hayes

Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people. We have no proof that the bad, stupid crazy people who have planted bombs in the past few years used the phone much for their stupid bad crimes, let alone logged on the Internet. Yet when those kind of bad things happen nowadays, the government tries to do bad things to phones and the Net. The phones and the Internet are just good smart things, and the government should leave them alone. You have to watch the government all the time on everything. Thomas Jefferson didn't say that, but he said something very close to that. ~ Penn Jillette