Quotes and anectdotes from the wise to the foolish, and the courageous to the drunk

poetry

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

Wine is bottled poetry.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.

Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

The novel is born of disillusionment the poem, of despair.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

The crown of literature is poetry.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

It is written on the arched sky it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

The cliche is dead poetry.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

God is the perfect poet.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

I read poetry to save time.

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Poetry is life distilled.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Teach you children poetry it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Money is a kind of poetry.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.