Quotes About Poetry

I've been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, 'I want to be a rapper.' But I'm a white girl, not going to be a rapper.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.

In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.

My wife, Keisha, came home once, and I had these violinists playing for her, and I'd prepared dinner for her, and I write poems. She's pretty amazing, so I like to celebrate that. She's really taught me how to celebrate life; that's something I've learned.

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.

If you take away a lot of the pretension and grandness from Shakespeare, a true poeticism is revealed.

Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.

Lucknow is a city of love and I am really desperate to know more of what Lucknow is really about.

I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.

There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

It's probably the first type of music we had, rhythm, whether it's poetry or tapping.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.