Quotes About Change

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.

If you want to change the world's spirit, I will suggest that only poetry can do this.

The poet is the one who breaks through our habits.

The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.

What will you do now with the gift of your left life?

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.

In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

For me, poetry has no point in existing if it's not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

Thats a wonderful change thats 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.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

Frances Bellamy thought the changes spoiled the poetry of it. He was a pretty stern guy. Everybody has some sense of humor, but I don't think he had much.

I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.

If I could get that girl [Courtney Love] to publish her poetry, the world would change.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

Actually, I didn't study photography at first. I went to school for painting my first year, poetry my second year, graphic design my third and fourth year, and photography my fifth.

Take what the old-church found in Mithra's tomb, candle and script and bell, take what the new-church spat upon and broke and shattered.

Can poetry be a form of social change? I don't know the answer to that. I do think art can have a social impact even if it may be difficult to see the effects of that impact, to assess or measure it.

This, in the end, might be the greatest social good of poetry: to get us to live differently, with a different sort of thinking and concentration, even if it's just for a few moments.