Quotes About Poetry

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I started writing poetry when I was in the fifth grade, just rhyming in class.

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

You can feel greatness in the ring. You can get two guys that gel together and it's just like poetry or a work of art.

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image - things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why - is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.

The beautiful uncut hair of graves.

First of all, most poems aren't memorable; in fact, they make no impression at all. Sorry, but it's true. There are brave blurbs on the back cover ("writes with a lyrical luminosity that reconceptualizes experience with cognitive beauty") but you open up the goods and they're like condoms on the beach, evidence that somebody was here once and had an experience but not of great interest to the passerby.

I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt's perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it's a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Lord, forgive me.

Christ, what a sad collection of losers, mm?' 'Too much time on their hands, mate. Leads to poetry.

You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say? Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

The best joy and beauty are the kinds that are unplanned, and the same is true of painting or poetry. Don't chew at it too much. It's beautiful, and it makes you remember a beautiful part of your life and that's enough.

When men see Han-shan They all say he's crazy And not much to look at - Dressed in rags and hides. They don't get what I say And I don't talk their language. All I can say to those I meet: Try and make it to Cold Mountain.

I wanted a good place to settle: Cold Mountain would be safe. Light wind in a hidden pine - Listen close - the sound gets better. Under it a gray haired man Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao. For ten years I havn't gone back home I've even forgotten the way by which I came.

They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.

Clarity, especially in poetry, requires conceiving of your work as a collaborative act of imagination with the audience, thus affording them the deepest respect.

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

The poetic image exists apart from causality.