Quotes About Poetry

O love's a simple word to sayWith nature aiding and abetting

Is not poetry the food of love?

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!- Elizabeth Bennet

I love John Ashbery. He's the - really the poet laureate of English language poetry, whether he's given that or not, he is to me.

There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.

The love-lorn nightingale nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well.

I love the kookiness of our speech. Speech is like wonderful magic and poetry in itself. I've always had to crib a lot from what I've heard.

The poet casts an eye on what is horrendous, but his truest life is in what sustains, restores, heals. Love, the act of loving, beauty, are first, fundamental truths.

The song is languid and speaks of love and loneliness and loss. Why does love seem to go with the sad things?

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

I'm an actress, primarily. I love to write poetry. I've been writing poetry since I was 12 years old.

I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.

This tiger is sprawled So still and so flat, A question arises When glancing thereat. Is he asleep? to be Perfectly frank, He looks more as if He was creamed by a tank!

I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and right there are an amazing set of distractions that we usually can't afford to follow. But the poet is willing to stop anywhere.

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

A poem is an interruption of silence, whereas prose is a continuation of noise.

Is not poetry a megaphone held up to the whispering lips of death?

C'è nessuno che voglia unirsi a me nel lanciare alcuni sassi verso quegli insegnanti che amano porre la domanda: «Che cosa sta cercando di dire il poeta?» come se Thomas Hardy e Emily Dickinson si fossero sforzati ma alla fine avessero fallito: disgraziati incapaci di parlare, che altro non erano, con la penna in bocca a guardare fuori dalla finestra in attesa d'un idea

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

New Calendar The poem of next year every week a line, every month a stanza, and a tiny sun rising and setting in every numbered square.

Dear Readers, Take my MasterClass. Buy my books. Watch The Poetry Broadcast. Eat Triscuits. Drink Jameson. Read, stretch, laugh, and listen to really good jazz.

And there is the silence of this morning which I have broken with my pen… — Billy Collins, from "Silence," The Trouble With Poetry - And Other Poems . (Random House August 10, 2011) Originally published 2005.