Poetry Is Quotes

Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it. ~ Lord Dunsany

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. ~ William Hazlitt

Think it's so unfair when people think that you're not a "real artist" unless you're getting paid for it ... I personally know so many poets that work a 9 to 5 in a cubicle and come home and write poetry. Their poetry is just as powerful and moving as anything that I've ever written, if not more. ~ Sarah Kay

Poetry is the way that we transcend language through language. And thus our freedom lies in the poetry of all things ~ Ilyas Kassam

Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals. ~ George Orwell

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know. ~ Mark Doty

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. ~ Edmund Burke

In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. ~ Anais Nin

Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That's progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers. ~ Odysseus Elytis

The purpose of poetry is not to provide a solution or, say, to stop a war or prevent millions of people from dying, etc. Poetry can never do that. Poetry is all about keeping the dialogue alive. Poetry must bring forth, time and again, issues that need attention and are intentionally or unintentionally forgotten. ~ Abhijit Sarmah

If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury! ~ Jennifer Stone

Shall I be able to understand the sense of what you have written?

No, King, what a poet writes is not meant to have any sense.

What then?

To have the tune itself.

What do you mean? Is there no philosophy in it?

No, none at all, thank goodness.

What does it say, then?

King, it says "I exist." Don't you know the meaning of the first cry of the new-born child? The child, when it is born, hears at once the cries of the earth and water and sky, which surround him,--and they all cry to him, "We exist," and his tiny little heart responds, and cries out in its turn, "I exist." My poetry is like the cry of that new-born child. It is a response to the cry of the Universe. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

If you want a definition of poetry, say: Poetry is what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or that or nothing and let it go at that. ~ Dylan Thomas

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. ~ Tobias Wolff

Perhaps the chief cause which has retarded the progress of poetry in America, is the want of that exclusive cultivation, which so noble a branch of literature would seem to require. Few here think of relying upon the exertion of poetic talent for a livelihood, and of making literature the profession of life. The bar or the pulpit claims the greater part of the scholar's existence, and poetry is made its pastime. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Poetry is best written with the growl and the gut. The heart and the head should be the realm to the reader. ~ Jeremy Young

Poetry is the breath of beauty. ~ Leigh Hunt

Poetry is the sound of the human animal. ~ Suniti Namjoshi

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. ~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry is painting with words where you create a masterpiece by spilling your feelings and emotions onto the blank paper. ~ Avijeet Das

I love poetry, be it in music or be it in Andrei Tarkovsky, Francesca Woodman or anyone else, I just love poetry. ~ Graciela Iturbide

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships. ~ Antonin Artaud

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler. ~ Mark Strand

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry. ~ Henry Purcell

Poetry is more than a form of art. It's a vibration and a pulsing heart. Whether it's sour or whether it's sweet. It can give you strength no one can defeat ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings. ~ Robert Graves

I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. ~ Alice Oswald

Poetry is the yearning of the soul to break free! ~ Avijeet Das

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. ~ Etel Adnan

The poet's nature is all searching, creator and nourisher of desire; the poet is like the heart in a people's breast, a people without a poet is a mere heap of clay. If the purpose of poetry is the fashioning of men, poetry is likewise the heir of prophecy. ~ Muhammad Iqbal

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us. ~ T. S. Eliot

Poetry is an act of love. ~ Debasish Mridha

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face. ~ Anne Sexton

Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls. ~ Voltaire

Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth. ~ Victor Hugo

Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen. ~ Fleur Adcock

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. ~ Allen Ginsberg

Painting is a kind of visual poetry as poetry is a kind of verbal painting. ~ Ahdaf Soueif

If the proper audience for poetry is God, then the proper audience for the novel is people. Plays have both stories and poetry. Therefore the proper audience for plays is: people and God. But: what is the audience for poetry in a godless universe? The audience for poetry in a godless universe is the academy. Or perhaps: other poets and therefore God? And what is the proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Is there no proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Must we invent our own gods? ~ Sarah Ruhl

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction. ~ Adrienne Rich

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. ~ Salvatore Quasimodo

My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well. ~ Jess Walter

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book. ~ Simon Schama

Speaking of people I had to exclude: Hank Williams. which is to say, songs are part of lyric poetry in my book, my thinking. In fact they are the urgent element of poetry in our time, they carry the most emotion for the most people in our culture. everyone LOVES poetry, because we all love (one form or another) of rock and roll (be it folk to emo to rap). It's all rock and roll and all lyric poetry. ~ Gregory Orr

Poetry is an art of telling the poet's own truth my bending and twisting it with his or her own emotional bulldozer. ~ Debasish Mridha

Poetry helps deliver messages. Poetry is an art; play with the words, the rhymes and your emotions. Experiment; discover yourself. This is exactly what I expect from you. Be creative, let the words guide you, never hold back, write as it comes, and edit later. ~ Jude Ouvrard

Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul ~ Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Here," Grace said as she opened the book again and tore out the page with the poem on it. I flinched as though I were in actual pain. "You should have it, if you like it. Pretty poetry is wasted on me." I took the paper from her and folded it and slipped it into my pocket, half of me horrified that she'd injured a book, the other half of me elated that she'd so willingly given me something that clearly meant a lot to her. ~ Krystal Sutherland

Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same ~ Edward Hirsch

Poetry is very similar to music, only less notes and more words. ~ Eddie Izzard

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves "children of the mist" – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts - and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth's happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven's exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given.

~ Sarah Josepha Hale
Ladies Magazine, November 1830

From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire ~ Deborah L. Halliday

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis. ~ May Sarton

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

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan. ~ Erica Jong

Contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. ~ Nick Hornby

You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more. ~ Robert Frost

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~ Carl Sandburg

Ho Kyuns poetry is in the tradition of his master, the incomparable Tu Fu, while remaining fully his own. Writing nine centuries later, Hos poetry strikes many parallels
the experiences of war and exile and constant struggle
and his voice is similarly humane. This is rich and enlightening reading. ~ Sam Hamill

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. ~ Allen Ginsberg

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.' ~ A.R. Ammons

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters. ~ Carl Sandburg

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint. ~ Elizabeth Smart

Poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can't be a poet. Mrs. ~ Flannery O'Connor

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. ~ Robert Penn Warren

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials. ~ May Sarton

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. ~ Robert Morgan

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time. ~ W.S. Merwin

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions. ~ Joseph Roux

Poetry is what is gained in translation. ~ Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is one of the easiest forms of writing; as long as you're willing to sell your soul to the world. ~ Shawna Platt

Prose poetry is not set to a melody or music so there's something freeing about it. ~ William Beckett

Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening. ~ Dana Gioia

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. ~ Johann G. Hamann

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. ~ John Drinkwater

Poetry is the essence and evidence of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over. ~ Michael Dirda

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out. ~ Marvin Bell

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. ~ Erica Jong

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. ~ Orson F. Whitney

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone ~ John Ciardi

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

To share poetry is one of the most intimate acts of friendship possible ... ~ Madeleine L'Engle

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music. ~ W. H. Auden

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible. ~ Jean Genet

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there's just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What'sToCome. ~ Charles Wright

Forget what you learned about poetry in school. (That it's complex, opaque, a problem to be solved in 1500 words by tomorrow.) Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. It holds the cadence of common life. It has a passion for truth and justice and liberty; it is a buoy to people in ordinary trouble: to a friend whose life has gone skidding into the meridian, who has been struck by bad news, who is frying eggs and hash browns and has whiny child clinging to his pant leg. ~ Garrison Keillor

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It's easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems - and to people - without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be. ~ Christian Wiman

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. ~ Mark Strand

Logic , like lyrical poetry , is no employment for the middle-aged ~ John Maynard Keynes

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words. ~ Daniel Radcliffe

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world ~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you. ~ Ellen Bass

Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Poetry is not made to be sucked up like a child's milkshake, it is much better sipped like a precious malt whisky. ~ Stephen Fry

Poetry is God's work. ~ Katy Lederer