Quotes About Poetry

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

I'm very grateful to all the people of Fresno, to Philip Levine and all the poets before me, and all the farmworkers. I didn't get here by myself.

Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn't know there were any South African poets.

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.

I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.

I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.

One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

I grew up in Banaras on Kabir and other Hindi poets and then I got introduced to Faiz, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal and Majaaz. They took me to another facet of literature and drama.

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

I love clever lyrics.

I love lyrics that are not too clever.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

I definitely used to write a lot at school. Comic poetry and drawings about people.

'In Memoriam' has been my companion for all my grownup life.

But I think for me, writing poetry when I was younger really helped me to condense an idea or a story into only so many words, because in a song you really only have three, four minutes to have a complete world in this song, so I think it definitely taught me to be concise.