Quotes About Poetry

Happy the man...with a natural gift for practising the right one [art] from the start-- poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless; whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.

I rhyme To see myself

Useless to think you'll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. "Postscript

A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can't be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Since when," he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends?

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme, Happy to catch me, just at dinner-time.

Still may syllables jar with time, Still may reason war with rhyme, Resting never!

Time eateth all things, could old poets say, The times are chang'd, our times drink all away.

When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!

This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.

I don't have a problem rhyming "bar" with "car" - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.

For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

Poetry isn't as relevant in the Western world as it is in Afghanistan. And not many people make time for something that doesn't feel relevant.

One of the things I'm constantly telling my students is that they're never going to write a poem everyone gets, or if they do, they've failed. They should leave someone behind every time.

I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.