Quotes About Poetry

Poetry can have varied and useful functions; and seduction is apparently something worth writing poetry for.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

the poetry made her uncomfortable. It was too much like reading spells.

Anyway, the thing is that we need to understand that with all — frankly, with all due respect for the requirements of international law, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, a peace process is a political enterprise. And there are things that governments can do and things that they cannot do, because if you do things that leave you without political support, then you can do nothing. You can write poetry, not make peace.

When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.

O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

The art of poetry belongs to life; one lives for it just as other people live for their essential vocations of whatever kind they may be. It is one's earthly home, and the other poets, dead or living, when masters of the art, are one's housemates.

writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn't something you have to share with other people.

Anyway, it's liberating when you get to a point in a poem where you can legitimately deviate from the form, and I like the tension that can exist between expectation and execution. Like there's something a little more idiosyncratic or individual going on.

People can't put on an opera, but they can write a poem. It's accessible art.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

It's never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it's kind of unkillable, poetry. It's our most ancient artform and I think it's more relevant today than ever, because it's one person saying what they really believe.

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

No matter even if you are cold, I like you better than anybody in the world. One time I said that you were my soul. And that still goes. You're all the things that I see in a sunset when I'm driving in from the country, the things that I like but can't make poetry of.

Topography is one of my chief themes in my poetry..about the country,the suburbs and the seaside...then there come's love..and increasingly; the fear of death.

Hymns are the poetry of the people.

If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry...thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.

[I]n every part of this eastern world, from Pekin to Damascus, the popular teachers of moral wisdom have immemorially been poets...

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in you humdrum routine, the true poetry of life - the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary person, of the plain, toilworn, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and griefs.

A wandering minstrel I—A thing of shreds and patches,Of ballads, songs and snatches,And dreamy lullaby!

Francesca da Rimini, miminy, piminy,Je-ne-sais-quoi young man!