Quotes About Poetry

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth.

It's a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds' cries.

Dylan captured what was on a million minds and turned it into poetry. With 'Blowin' in the Wind' or 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' he set a whole new standard.

If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to wonder.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook.

People listened to Farsi texts, and to the great texts of our Baba Bulleh Shah, Khwaja Ghulam Farid, Mian Mohammad Bakhsh Jehlmi. People do listen to it these days, but much less than in those days.

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.

In The Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each other's art, so we can effect a synthesis.

The first thing I remember writing was a poem - about a princess who sat on a hill and sang all day - when I was eight.

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

The one thing they didn't tell you at Iowa is how hard it is to make a living writing fiction and poetry.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.