Quotes About Poetry

The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.

If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.

One cannot build life from refrigerators, politics, credit statements and crossword puzzles. That is impossible. Nor can one exist for any length of time without poetry, without color, without love.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

The central issue of poetry as of politics is the destiny of the human personality.

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

I think the reason you see so many people dropping out of politics is because there's an anti-poetic strain in modern political discourse.

The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.

I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics.

The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body.

There is a long-standing tradition in America of scoffing at poets, especially if they show any interest in politics.

The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.

I'm not from the arts, I'm a law professor. But I think we need more poetry in politics.

Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers-or both.

Your personality should be described in poem not in paragraph.

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.