Quotes About Poetry

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

To me, poetry is spoken - not exclusively, but there's a mix of languages in it. That's what I liked about 'For the Confederate Dead;' it has many different tones to it.

I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers, If I belittle dogs and mothers.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.

Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I've probably written such things and then torn them up.

I had originally planned to do musical theatre and be on Broadway, but then my love for poetry also set in. Once that happened, I became torn between a career as an English teacher or a music teacher.

You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

If starlight sparkles are lovely Than all i need to do is look in your eyes To see love

His first word, his first day at junior high. Nonsense things, the deepest, most important poetry of my life.

Is it like a rust, a rheum about the heart?

The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising.

Southern life follows not the rules of logic, but the whims of poetry. The ways of Southern womanhood have always been distinct. After all, nobody's filming Steel Magnolias about the women of North Dakota, and a Ya-Ya Sisterhood has yet to be discovered in Rhode Island.

They call it poetry, what she feels with her mouth closed. By his.

Dr. Atkinson thinks it was as far away as two thousand years ago that the Irish began to grace their then ancient poetic art with their new Invention of rhyme. From the Latin verses of Colm and other earliest Irish saints, we have positive proof that, anyhow, rhyme was in use in Ireland in the very earliest Christian times — both vowel rhyme (assonance) and consonantal rhyme called comharda.