Quotes About Poetry

Only poetry can address grief.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

We're nature. Our minds are nature. Our desire to make poetry is nature.

That's what interests me in poetry. That withholding, that white space, the pressure, and my long-term faith in violent concision, is still with me.

Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

I want a poem which is made of compression, passion, precision, symmetry, & disruption.

Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.

Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

Verses devoid of substance, melodious trifles. [Lat., Versus inopes rerum, nugaeque canorae.]

I always wanted to write poetry, even when I was very young.

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

Love is an irrational force, making humans do all sorts of strange and wonderful things like write poetry and take up the ukulele.

Poetry is one of the most full ways of discovering what it feels like to be a human being in this particular moment, in this particular set of concerns. It's all about discovery.

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry