Quotes About Poetry

No amount of virtuosic skill and choice of subject matter can be a substitute for depth and poetry.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

Modern poets add a lot of water to their ink.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

Poetry gave me back my voice.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.

I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.

I like putting common expressions next to uncommon expressions. I'm sure in Poetry 101 there is a name for it, but it seems like you usually go one way or the other in rock music.

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.