Quotes About Poetry

My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

Poetry and prose can start a revolution, break walls, and ideas can build nations.

While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

And searched the wood for Jenny, too, as soon as dawn had broken blue

as I travel the city / hating poetry & my haircut & all the things I do not / want to do

Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it's not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Four hundred and fifty years earlier, the poet Kabir, whose profession as a spinner/weaver was in part emulated by Gandhi, had also spoken of Ram-Rahim.

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

The real meaning of a poem is to stop time.

Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid.

Language is the archives of history…. Language is fossil poetry.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem.

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

So of all the particulars of health and exercise, and fit nutriment, and tonics. Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.