Quotes About Poetry

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

Poetry, like dreams, will eventually break through every person's consciousness, even the tightest iconoclast's.

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

Lovers needn't always agree, anymore than poetry need always rhyme.

I taught myself Russian, which was very, very useful, especially for poetry and in fact if you can't read Pushkin in Russian, you're really missing something.

I think that if poetry is not a personal act, it's a pamphlet.

It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

Our best history is still poetry.

I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.

Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts,or emotions

Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.

I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

Meditation is the most significant because it opens the door for all other significant things: love, prayer, God, light, music, poetry.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.

Are democracy and poetry exclusive of one another and, if so, why?

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It's a land of higher ideals.