Quotes About Poetry

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.

Leaving college early to play pro football was the best thing that happened to me. I got to drop the most boring poetry class. Dumbest thing I did was being in that class.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

It always has been and forever will be impossible for slavery or any kind or form of injustice to produce a great poet.

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.

I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.

Shakespeare is the best writing ever. It's incredibly rich, dense, expressive language.

And she was fair as is the rose in May.

I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?

Tears are the noble language of the eye.

Delicious tears! The heart's own dew.

If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that's the best.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

Sometimes a poem appeals to me technically, just because of the way a line feels on my lips. Sometimes it is because it says something I have felt, or sometimes something that I suddenly recognise. Other times it can change the way I see something.

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).

There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.

Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven.

I really disliked Philadelphia society - really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.