Quotes About Poetry

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.

I love all kinds of music. My dad's from London, so he loves David Bowie, the Stones, The Clash. I grew up with that influence while loving poetry and loving all kinds of current music.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.

I grew up listening to the 60's and 70's... storytellers and poets.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

You look to me like misty roses Too soft to touch But too lovely to leave alone

German poets betrayed their savagery, being moved 'more by hatred for other people's countries than by love of their own'.3

and a day spent working for money is wasted while a day spent writing poetry is wasted but more honest.

But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth-century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can't make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we're lucky, poetry.