Quotes About Poetry

The Masters is poetry to me.

Poetry is meant to be heard.

Some people just have a love for words and thinking about words that rhyme.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

I've always really liked the rhythm element of songs.

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

The first 'Ring' in Bayreuth was about the poetical world, the mythological world.

Robert Browning - I like his dramatic revelations, his allegorical form.

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

I don't like scaring people off. When I tell people I'm a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry, and they think I'm weird.

From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.

Rap is the pulsation given by some, usually an electronic rhythm section, without any tonality, and you have someone reading high-school poetry.

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.

I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better.

Hoe bang ik ook was, ik besefte dat dit altijd het lot van een dichter zou zijn: geïsoleerd en alleen te zijn, naar antwoorden te haken, met als gezelschap slechts letters en niet-aflatende kwellingen.

The erotic drive is the great energy that moves through all evolution. What about love? Where does that fit in? Love's simply the handmaiden of the great energy, and an excuse to write suspect poetry.

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.

His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.

The Bible itself is a dynamic text full of poetry, prose, history, law and myth all clashing together in a cacophony of voices. We are presented with a warrior God and a peacemaker, a God of territorial allegiance and a God who transcends all territorial divides, an unchanging God and a God who can be redirected, a God of peace and a God of war, a God who is always watching the world and a God who fails to notice the oppression against Israel in Egypt.

The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available – the language of parables, prose and poetry. This is why the mystics would write so extensively about how nothing can be written and would preach beautiful sermons about the futility of words. Without such well-honed words we may begin to think that we have something to say instead of viewing our life as the space out of which God speaks.