Quotes About Poetry

In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.

Ennius was the father of Roman poetry, because he first introduced into Latin the Greek manner and in particular the hexameter metre.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

News isn't designed to talk about daily life in its nuances, but poetry is.

If anxiety is the major force of our contemporary condition, a lot of poetry - including my own, mostly - sort of tries to escape that, fly off into magical thinking or bewilderment or whatever.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.

The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.

Poetry makes sense of the parts of human experience that are confusing and not decodable in any other way. It makes accessible the inaccessible.

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.

The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain.

I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.

Oh for a seat in some poetic nook, Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!

Some people can't go into church any longer to feel this longing, but they still have the longing, so what do they do? Well, one thing you can do is what people do in prison; they turn to poetry.

So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.