Quotes About Poetry

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that theater excels over film and TV in its ability to let people play with poetry.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.

[The story of Adam and Eve] it's poetry. One must interpret it as poetry. The first 11 chapters of Genesis [the Primeval History] are absolutely remarkable.

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

I go to a lot of museums, I read a ton of poetry - anything that's a creative expression of oneself, I find really inspiring.

There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.

I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

Poetry -- even bad poetry -- may be our final hope.

Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.