Quotes About Poetry

God makes many poets, but he only gives utterance to a few.

If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.

Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds; They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads; They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight, And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

It's as serious as anyone ever gets, you know. It's just words. It's just good poetry.

Good-bye to the lies of the poets. [Lat., Valeant mendacia vatum.]

I agree that comedy does a good job - and is often about - stepping over the line - Lenny Bruce, etc. - and that this is important for a lot of poets too. I guess I feel like there has to be depth.

Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.

I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

But I always loved songs with great lyrics.

Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be 'discovered' by somebody else.

All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.