Quotes About Poetry

Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

Music resembles poetry, in each Are nameless graces which no methods teach, And which a master hand alone can reach.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I love the autumn for its sense of melancholy seems to strike my need for sadness. There is poetry in the dying of the year and mystery as well.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Wine is bottled poetry.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

Poetry evokes out of words the resonance of the primordial world.