Quotes About Poetry

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

To be poet laureate is to try to spread the love and the accessibility of poetry to young people.

I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.

I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.

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

I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

There's no musical landscape to poetry. It has somewhat of a higher standard than songs, I think.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

A day will come when man will discover an alphabet in the eyes of the chalcedonies, in the marking of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.

She sings the songs without words Songs that sailors, and blind men, and beggars have heard She knows more of love than the poets can say And her eyes are for something that won't go away.

The poet begins where the man ends. The man's lot is to live his human life, the poet's to invent what is nonexistent.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.

Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds'The Week's Survey, 18 June 1904

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.