Quotes About Poetry

Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.

Perhaps poetry is another of science's deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.

Men who had poetry in their soul come silently into the world and live quietly down the years, and yet when they are gone no moon in the sky is lucid enough to compare with the light they shed when they are among the living.

Minh'alma chove frio, tristinho. Não te comove este versinho?

Se procurar bem, você acaba encontrando não a explicação (duvidosa) da vida, mas a poesia (inexplicável) da vida.

Penetra surdamente no reino das palavras Lá estão os poemas que esperam ser escritos.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

Poets sing our human music for us.

I think of him in certain lights, dawn, late afternoon,...

When did your name change from a proper noun to a charm? Its three vowels like jewels on the thread of my breath. Its consonants brushing my mouth like a kiss. I love your name. I say it again and again in this summer rain. I see it, discreet in the alphabet, like a wish. I pray it into the night till its letters are light. I hear your name rhyming, rhyming, rhyming with everything. "Name

I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey. Bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song.

Nick Makoha's first full-length collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree £8.99), was the 2017 debut which most excited me. Focused on Uganda during the Idi Amin dictatorship, his poetry is charged with ethical sensibility. The lines protest as they sing "the song disturbed by helicopter blades…" but they don't simplify things: they explore, and complicate. Personal witness and artistry are one. The Guardian

How does a poet know when a poem is ended? Because it lies flat, taut; nothing can be added or subtracted. How does a woman know when a marriage is over? Because of the way her life suddenly shears off in just two directions: past and future.

The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.

When you're going through something, whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody, you often feel like 'Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact, poetry's a nice reminder that, no, everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.

Sometimes we all need a poem.

Once more, my harp! once more, although I thought Never to wake thy silent strings again, A wandering dream thy gentle chords have wrought, And my sad heart, which long hath dwelt in pain, Soars, like a wild bird from a cypress bough, Into the poet's Heaven, and leaves dull grief below