Quotes About Poetry

The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.

What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)

A lot of people, when you ask if they want to read your epic poem, start bolting for the door.

Poets can't worry about popularity since loving life and humanity involves saying what some people don't want to hear.

As I published books, I realized, that's not really what I want. I don't care about the books as much anymore. I just want to write poetry.

The poet must put on the passion he wants to represent.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.

I love that people want to know about poetry. It's one of the ways of keeping alive.

I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing.

I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

Curse us eh/I'll make you pay!/I don't want to rhyme all day!

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away.

Poets find truth by writing about what they love.

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

wildflower pressed into the page reading "Tintern Abbey." Jerry had marked a passage: If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance

Poetry is the great stimulation of life. Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism.

we that were wood when that wide wood was in a physical Universe playing with words bark be my limbs my hair be leaf Bride be my bow my lyre my quiver