Quotes About Poetry

I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.

I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

I have a certain amount of creative energy, and it used to go painting. Now most of it goes to music. I like to make things. I treat the songs more like poems than prose, so in that sense, I don't really have a point to make. I just try to be surprised.

I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.

The point of an experiment is not to arrive at a predetermined end point, to prove or disprove anything, but to deliver a poem that reveals much about the process taken.

Both stupid and lacking in foresight those poets of old who wrote songs for revels and dinners and banquets - pleasant sounds for men living at ease; but none of them all has discovered how to put to an end with their singing or musical instrument - grief, bitter grief from which death and disaster cheat the hopes of a house

Tú, Troya, patria mía, no serás ya contada entre las ciudades jamás conquistadas.

Both stupid and lacking in foresight those poets of old who wrote songs for revels and dinners and banquets - pleasant sounds for men living at ease; but none of them all has discovered how to put to and end with their singing or musical instrument - grief, bitter grief from which death and disaster cheat the hopes of a house.

She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good...