Quotes About Poetry

poetry is always dependent on realism, that you have to be a realist or you can't be a poet. Mrs.

For me, poetry was... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.

Watching and learning from the great Josette Bushell-Mingo, who was playing Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at the time, and then to return to the same stage six months later playing a lead role, was incredible - I fell in love with the poetry and the breadth of the language so much that I didn't want it to end.

I firmly believe that Tagore should be taught in schools all over India.

Yes, I love poetry, both to read and to write it. A first love.

I often say poetry was my first love.

My first love is literature.

'Hamilton' is, of course, closely tied to the Obamas because Lin first performed the opening number at a White House poetry jam.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

I wholeheartedly rejected anything remotely feminine but was not enthusiastic about anything masculine, either. I did not want to cook and have babies, and I did not want to be an engineer or a baseball player or a soldier or a politician or any of the myriad careers open mostly or solely to men. I wanted to be a poet.

What excites me is that I'm an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life. I think that's good news.

In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief.

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

Go now, verses, on your light feet, you have not trodden hard on the old earth where the graves laugh when they see their guests, the one corpse stacked on top of the other. Go now and stagger to her whom I do not know.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.

'The Dante Club' was one of America's most important book clubs, as their Wednesday night meetings ultimately led to our country's first exposure to Dante's poetry on a wide scale.

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.

What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.

Maybe I was blessed that my main drive was purely selfish. I needed to make something, make my life better, wider, have poetry in my life, have something that gives me hope on an everyday basis. That was my main drive all along, really.