Quotes About Poetry

The essence of poetry is will and passion.

I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

I've always had a fondness for language... English. Not that I use it correctly but I like words. I like books and I like poetry.. I like the written word... and the sung word.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

I hate French poetry. What measured glitter!

A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.

Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.

Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.

Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in cities.

Poetry, is the insulation that lies between the inner walls of the mind.

One can be well-bred and write bad poetry

Poetry is always close kin to the impossible, isn't it?

Indignation leads to the making of poetry. [Lat., Facit indignatio versum.]

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

Can poetry be a form of social change? I don't know the answer to that. I do think art can have a social impact even if it may be difficult to see the effects of that impact, to assess or measure it.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

At McCormick Theological Seminary I had to take Hebrew, so I began to read prophetic poetry, and suddenly it became the life I wanted to spend.