Quotes About Poetry

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

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

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway? Can anyone die without even a little?

You don't read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you'd be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were … thieves. And aren't we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral.

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.

The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality

Great periods of poetry begin with an inordinate self-consciousness, and only gradually attain to the natural.

Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you--almost apart from their meaning--a thrill like music?

In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attendance upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

The fact that poetry is not of the slightest economic or political importance, that is has no attachment to any of the powers that control the modern world, may set it free to do the only thing that in this age it can do -to keep the neglected parts.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.