Quotes About Poetry

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

Fog and hypocrisy - that is to say, shadow, convention, decency - these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

Get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.

That's a rather flippant quote "drinking and writing bad poetry" from me. I mean, I said it, but I was doing other stuff too. I certainly didn't manage the full stretch of four years.

Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned this, we need to be careful with drugs! They're not just all fun and games! And of course poetry would be immeasurably worse without humor.

A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.

Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.

Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.

... the radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.

I keep trying to define poetry, but its so difficult.

Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

Profound thoughts and profound experiences get revealed to be tricks that we play on ourselves, and poetry gets revealed to be just, like, some dumb words that somebody put in an interesting order.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

When I read poetry, I read it aloud. It's so much better that way.

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.