Quotes About Poetry

There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime – a whole word for just being sad – about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die." — Sarah Ruhl

That is why they have poets—to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

I have loved enough women to know how to paint. If I had loved fewer, I would be an illustrator; if I had loved more, I would be a poet.

Put the bad poetry in the mouths of outlandish characters. It might make bad poetry funny instead of sad.

Yes, Emily Dickenson -- a rather exhausting poet, now I come to think of it. All that breathlessness and skipping about. What's wrong with nice, long lines and a jaunty rhythm?

What she lacks in poetry she makes up for in venom

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

My father's a preacher, my mother's a teacher, thus I rhyme.

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

i thought to myself well if there's a sucker out there it may as well be me for believing this jerk would stay in business if he paid all his writers like he was going to pay me. i mean he must not have even realized that poetry doesn't sell!

You're like a book I hate to read, a story I want to skip through to the end. You take my soul and blow me straight into hell. I'm high on wigged out poems, short shorts that don't stop. Am I dead? I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S REAL! What about you?

For each individual among the many has a share of excellence and practical wisdom, and when they meet together, just as they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses, so too with regard to their character and thought. Hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry, for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole. (Aristotle, Politics, book 3, chapter 11)

More power added to a recording of poor poetry simply resulted in louder poor poetry.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.