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Quotes with tag Poetry:

Author	Quote	Rank
Charles Baudelaire	It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.	101
Edmund Clarence Stedman	Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.	101
Lewis Thomas	The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.	101
Mary Karr	Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.	101
Orson F. Whitney	Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.	101
Pablo Neruda	I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.	101
Plutarch	Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.	101
Vanessa Redgrave	Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.	101
Wilfred Owen	My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.	101
Alice Oswald	One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.	101
Edward Hirsch	Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.	101
Frank Iero	Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!	101
James Laughlin	I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.	101
Lucille Clifton	Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.	101
Natalie Merchant	Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.	101
Nell Freudenberger	I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.	101
Peter Davison	Poetry is composing for the breath.	101
Rita Dove	Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.	101
Robert Fitzgerald	Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.	101
Tom Glazer	I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.	101
Jean Giraudoux	The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.	101
John Cage	I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.	101
Lascelles Abercrombie	That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.	101
Robert Graves	There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.	101
Czeslaw Milosz	What is poetry which does not save nations or people?	101
Diane Wakoski	Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.	101
George Oppen	Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.	101
James Fenton	Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.	101
Muriel Rukeyser	Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.	101
Taylor Mali	If you've ever been to a poetry slam, you know that the highest scoring emotion is self-righteous indignation: how dare you judge me. So in that way, the poem, 'What Teachers Make,' is an absolutely formulaic slam poem designed to allow me to get up on my soap box and say, 'Let me tell you what really makes me angry.'	101
Anthony Hecht	Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.	101
C. K. Williams	I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.	101
David Josiah Brewer	Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.	101
David Knopfler	I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.	101
Galway Kinnell	That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.	101
Guy Johnson	My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.	101
Jonas Mekas	In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.	101
Jose Bergamin	The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.	101
Lisel Mueller	Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.	101
Theresa Breslin	When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.	101
Elizabeth Jennings	For me, poetry is always a search for order.	101
Jesmyn Ward	I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.	101
Adrian Mitchell	Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.	101
Beverley Nichols	Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.	101
Brian Harris	To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.	101
Douglas Dunn	A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.	101
John Barton	If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.	101
Marshall Brickman	Music pulled me like a gravitational force. I entered college as a physics major but left as a Bachelor of Music, a degree with the same practical application as, say, one in the History of Chinese Poetry.	101
Robert Penn Warren	How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.	101
Roberta Smith	The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we're lucky, we all have at least one.	101
Susan Stewart	The length and shape of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection and commentary.	101
Carlos Drummond de Andrade	Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?	101
Charles Simic	Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.	101
John Ashbery	There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.	101
Julio Cortazar	Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.	101
Reynolds Price	The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.	101
James Dickey	I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.	101
James Schuyler	However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.	101
Jane Hirshfield	I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.	101
J. G. Stedman	Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.	101
J. Milton Hayes	I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.	101
John Fuller	I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best served by these things.	101
James Gates Percival	The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.	101
Leonard Cohen	Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.	102
Allen Ginsberg	Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.	102
Carl Sandburg	Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.	102
Denis Diderot	When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.	102
Francisco Goya	Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.	102
Georges Seurat	Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.	102
Joseph Joubert	You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.	102
Natasha Trethewey	The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.	102
Peter Steele	It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.	102
W. Somerset Maugham	The crown of literature is poetry.	102
Yitzhak Navon	I grew up in Jerusalem and went to school here. I studied at the Hebrew University - mostly Islam and Arabic: Arab literature, Arab poetry and culture, because I felt like we are living in this region, in the Middle East, and we are not alone: There are nations here whose culture is Arab.	102
A. E. Housman	Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.	102
Abbas Kiarostami	In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.	102
Carol Ann Duffy	I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.	102
Edward Dowden	For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.	102
Edward Hirsch	I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.	102
Jim Jarmusch	I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.	102
Linton Kwesi Johnson	I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.	102
Lucille Clifton	People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.	102
Norman MacCaig	And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.	102
Phil Ochs	There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.	102
Rita Dove	I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.	102
Anne Stevenson	A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.	102
Lascelles Abercrombie	But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.	102
Louise Jameson	I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.	102
Sarah Kay	Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.	102
Tea Obreht	When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.	102
Tracy K. Smith	So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.	102
William Rose Benet	Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.	102
Diane Wakoski	I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.	102
George Oppen	The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.	102
John Millington Synge	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.	102
Laurie Lee	What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.	102
Mark Knopfler	The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.	102
Adam Braun	What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.	102
Brooks Atkinson	It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.	102
C. K. Williams	Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.	102
Mark Strand	Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.	102
Miller Williams	I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.	102
Ryan Adams	Music is my thing. It's my thing; it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me; it's Christmas to me; religion to me; poetry to me.	102
Sharon Creech	I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.	102
Daphne Gottlieb	I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.	102
David Hunt	Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.	102
J. Courtney Sullivan	I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.	102
June Jordan	So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.	102
Tom Wesselmann	I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.	102
Adrian Mitchell	Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.	102
Alex Flinn	I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.	102
Ally Condie	One of the things I've always liked about my husband is he's very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he's very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.	102
David Lehman	Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.	102
Robert Penn Warren	The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.	102
Saint-John Perse	The poet existed among the cave men; he will exist among men of the atomic age, for he is an inherent part of man. Even religions have been born from the need for poetry, which is a spiritual need, and it is through the grace of poetry that the divine spark lives forever in the human flint.	102
Stephen Spender	Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.	102
Stevie Smith	I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.	102
John Betjeman	Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.	102
Joshua Logan	Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.	102
Raymond Aubrac	Learn poetry by heart. If you know a poem by heart, no one can take it away from you, and you can take advantage of it anytime.	102
Richard Eberhart	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.	102
Robert Bringhurst	I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.	102
James Lasdun	The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.	102
John Clare	He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.	102
J. Carter Brown	I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.	102
Billy Collins	People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.	103
Bo Burnham	There's a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that's a bit blurred in my mind.	103
Charles Baudelaire	Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.	103
Ellen Hopkins	Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.	103
Franz Wright	Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.	103
Isaac Rosenberg	I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.	103
Jean Cocteau	The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.	103
Jenkin Lloyd Jones	Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.	103
Naguib Mahfouz	I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.	103
Omari Hardwick	Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.	103
Wallace Stevens	In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.	103
Yusef Komunyakaa	Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.	103
Archibald MacLeish	Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.	103
David Carradine	If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.	103
Fernand Leger	What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.	103
George William Curtis	Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.	103
Harry Mathews	Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.	103
Henry R. Luce	There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.	103
Ishmael Reed	Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.	103
Peter Davison	I like poems that are little games.	103
Romesh Gunesekera	Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.	103
Susan Vreeland	To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.	103
Tahar Ben Jelloun	I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.	103
W. S. Merwin	Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.	103
Anne Stevenson	Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.	103
Gary Hume	If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.	103
George Murray	I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.	103
Norman O. Brown	Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.	103
Philip Levine	Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.	103
Rebecca Sugar	I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.	103
Teresa Palmer	The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.	103
Andres Segovia	Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.	103
Caitriona Balfe	The Scottish Highlands are incredible. There seems to be magic and poetry everywhere.	103
Diane Wakoski	I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.	103
Ellen Bass	Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.	103
Ernst Haas	Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.	103
Marcus du Sautoy	The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.	103
Trevor McDonald	Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.	103
Alice Sebold	I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.	103
Giorgos Seferis	For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.	103
Mark Strand	And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.	103
Mike Leigh	The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.	103
Paul Celan	Poetry is a sort of homecoming.	103
Robert Creeley	That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.	103
Simon Armitage	People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.	103
Lord Alfred Douglas	All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.	103
Anthony Hope	I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.	103
Megan McCafferty	Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.	103
Robert Adamson	There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.	103
Stevie Smith	All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.	103
Charles Simic	Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.	103
Dennis Gabor	Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.	103
Margaret Walker	The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.	103
Maurice Druon	Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.	103
Amy Clampitt	Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.	103
Jane Yolen	When you realize my best selling books are 'Owl Moon,' the 'How Do Dinosaur' books, and 'Devil's Arithmetic,' how can the public make sense of that! I have fans who think I only write picture books or only write SF and fantasy. I have fanatics of my poetry and are stunned to find out I write prose, too!	103
John Drinkwater	A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.	103
John F. Kerry	I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.	103
John Fowles	We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.	103
Juan Ramon Jimenez	Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.	103
Edgar Allan Poe	I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.	104
Robert Frost	Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.	104
T. S. Eliot	Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.	104
Amanda Seyfried	I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.	104
Billy Collins	Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.	104
Daniel Radcliffe	As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.	104
Franz Grillparzer	Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.	104
Ian Hamilton Finlay	For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.	104
Nathalie Sarraute	One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.	104
Octavio Paz	To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.	104
Orson F. Whitney	It is my belief that many who think they dislike poetry are really poetical in their natures and are indebted to it, more than they imagine, for the success they may have achieved, even in practical pursuits, and for the enjoyment their lives have afforded them.	104
Paul Muldoon	For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.	104
Vikram Seth	Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.	104
Walter Mosley	Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.	104
Henry Anatole Grunwald	In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief.	104
Joy Harjo	When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.	104
Mahmoud Darwish	Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.	104
Michael Franti	Every single soul is a poem.	104
Peter Davison	Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.	104
Robert Morgan	Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.	104
Salvatore Quasimodo	Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.	104
Shelby Foote	I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.	104
Andrew Motion	I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.	104
George W. Romney	My wife has been my greatest earthly inspiration. She excels in eloquence, the poetry of words, empathy and graciousness.	104
Hart Crane	And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.	104
John Cusack	It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.	104
Karl Shapiro	Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.	104
Manuel Puig	I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.	104
Marianne Moore	Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.	104
Naomi Klein	We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.	104
Thom Gunn	My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.	104
Tracy K. Smith	I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.	104
Edwin Morgan	Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.	104
Ellen Bass	I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them.	104
Hamlin Garland	There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.	104
James Branch Cabell	Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.	104
Louis-Ferdinand Celine	The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.	104
Louis Dudek	The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.	104
Basil Bunting	The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.	104
John Crowe Ransom	The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?	104
Mary Pope Osborne	I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.	104
Roger McGough	If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.	104
Adrian Mitchell	Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.	104
John Barton	No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?	104
Robert Adamson	Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.	104
Spoken Reasons	Comedy was something I picked up trying to perfect my art through spoken word. I got on YouTube just to show off my poetry, and then people thought I was funny, so I ran with it.	104
Stephane Mallarme	You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.	104
Jack Prelutsky	Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.	104
Marcus Mumford	I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.	104
Rafael Moneo	I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.	104
John Drinkwater	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.	104
Jhene Aiko	As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.	104
John Denham	Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.	104
John Holmes	To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.	104
Emily Dickinson	If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.	105
Soren Kierkegaard	What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.	105
Allen Ginsberg	Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.	105
Christian Louboutin	Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.	105
Earl Sweatshirt	It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.	105
Edith Sitwell	Poetry is the deification of reality.	105
Flea	All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.	105
Horace Walpole	Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.	105
Natasha Trethewey	Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.	105
Paul Rand	To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.	105
Roger Waters	I think there are things in my story that have helped my creativity. Your father being killed, for instance, is one of the best things that could happen to a kid if he's going to write poetry or songs.	105
Sherman Alexie	You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.	105
Vanessa Diffenbaugh	The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine.	105
Vikram Seth	Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.	105
Walter Dean Myers	I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.	105
Yevgeny Yevtushenko	A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.	105
Yusef Komunyakaa	I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering.	105
Carol Ann Duffy	You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.	105
Daniel Woodrell	I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.	105
Edward Hirsch	There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.	105
F. L. Lucas	Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.	105
James Laughlin	I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.	105
Lynn Johnston	And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.	105
Mario Cuomo	You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.	105
Norman MacCaig	All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.	105
Robert Morgan	I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.	105
Tahar Ben Jelloun	Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.	105
Gilbert Murray	The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.	105
Graham Joyce	The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.	105
Henry Austin Dobson	I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.	105
Richard Hell	Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.	105
Robert Pinsky	I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.	105
Thom Gunn	There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.	105
Azar Nafisi	This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?	105
Bruce Cockburn	I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.	105
Charles Olson	You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.	105
Diane Wakoski	PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.	105
James Fenton	When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.	105
C. K. Williams	When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.	105
James F. Cooper	I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination?	105
Sonja Sohn	This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry - which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just dropping into the work and really pouring out my soul.	105
Amanda Plummer	I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible. In grade school, I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.	105
John Barton	Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.	105
John Masefield	Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.	105
Merritt Wever	I used to joke that if acting didn't work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback.	105
Rick Fox	Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.	105
Robert Penn Warren	The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.	105
Sidney Lanier	Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.	105
John Ashbery	I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.	105
Jane Yolen	Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.	105
John Drinkwater	But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.	105
Jane Hirshfield	Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.	105
Bob Dylan	It's not easy to define poetry.	106
John Keats	The poetry of the earth is never dead.	106
David Whyte	Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.	106
Georges Braque	Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.	106
Ian Hamilton Finlay	But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.	106
Paul Dirac	In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.	106
Seamus Heaney	Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.	106
Wallace Stevens	Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.	106
Yehuda Amichai	I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.	106
Edward Hirsch	The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.	106
Gary Hamel	As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.	106
Guy Davenport	Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.	106
J. G. Ballard	When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.	106
James Laughlin	I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.	106
Louis MacNeice	For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one's poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.	106
Rhys Ifans	When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.	106
Rita Dove	Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.	106
Eugenio Montale	Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.	106
John Singer Sargent	It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry.	106
Lascelles Abercrombie	Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.	106
Marilyn Hacker	Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.	106
N. Scott Momaday	As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.	106
Shelby Lynne	I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.	106
Thom Gunn	Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.	106
Chrisette Michele	I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.	106
Lemon Andersen	For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad.	106
Michael Graves	I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.	106
Tristan Wilds	Well, I write a lot of poetry - that's where it usually all starts. I definitely want to show you guys sides of me - love, loss, heartbreak - all of that good stuff!	106
Mae Whitman	I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.	106
Mark Van Doren	The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.	106
Raymond Carver	When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.	106
Simon Armitage	If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.	106
Roger McGough	Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.	106
Adrian Mitchell	I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.	106
Anna Jameson	Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.	106
Julianna Baggott	And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.	106
Robert Adamson	Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.	106
Sidney Lanier	I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.	106
Jack Prelutsky	We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.	106
Jacques Maritain	Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.	106
Percy Bysshe Shelley	Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.	107
Allen Ginsberg	The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.	107
Bindi Irwin	I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.	107
David Whyte	Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.	107
George Sand	He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.	107
Ivan Turgenev	A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.	107
Oscar Hijuelos	I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.	107
Paul Muldoon	One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.	107
Paul Valery	A poem is never finished, only abandoned.	107
Wallace Stevens	A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.	107
Yusef Komunyakaa	Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.	107
Barry Eisler	I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.	107
Carol Ann Duffy	I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.	107
Gordon Getty	I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.	107
Helen Dunmore	Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.	107
Kenneth Koch	As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.	107
Lafcadio Hearn	But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese, apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose.	107
Matthew Arnold	Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.	107
Thomas Gray	Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.	107
Chris Jordan	One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.	107
David Antin	I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.	107
George Farquhar	Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.	107
George Murray	Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.	107
Hannah Kent	I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.	107
Jerry Spinelli	I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.	107
John Cage	There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.	107
John Ciardi	You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.	107
Lionel Trilling	The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.	107
Mary Lambert	Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.	107
Naomi Shihab Nye	As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.	107
Robert Pinsky	Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.	107
William Collins	Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.	107
Azar Nafisi	I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.	107
Jane Campion	As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.	107
Janet Fitch	I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.	107
Sally Kirkland	I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.	107
Billy Collins	Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.	108
Caroline Kennedy	When you're going through something, whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody, you often feel like 'Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed; I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact, poetry's a nice reminder that, no, everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.	108
Hu Shih	On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.	108
Huston Smith	Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.	108
Ian Hamilton Finlay	But at the beginning it was clear to me that concrete poetry was peculiarly suited for using in public settings. This was my idea, but of course I never really much got the chance to do it.	108
Marilynne Robinson	One of the things that is wonderful about hymns is that they are a sort of universally shared poetry, at least among certain populations.	108
Orson F. Whitney	The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.	108
Paul Muldoon	That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.	108
Robert Schumann	The flame that is naturally clear always gives the most light and heat. If I could blend my talent for poetry and music into one, the light would burn still clearer, and I might go far.	108
Wallace Stevens	Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.	108
Walter Pater	Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.	108
Wislawa Szymborska	Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.	108
Antonin Artaud	Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.	108
Boris Pasternak	I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.	108
Eugene H. Peterson	In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.	108
Gaston Bachelard	The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.	108
Kenneth Koch	I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.	108
Paul Engle	Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.	108
Robert Morgan	If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.	108
Salvatore Quasimodo	He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.	108
Teju Cole	Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people's space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it's literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song.	108
Andrew Bird	I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.	108
Ed Westwick	I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.	108
Lascelles Abercrombie	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.	108
Robert Staughton Lynd	Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.	108
A. R. Ammons	Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.	108
Chris Abani	Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.	108
Diane Wakoski	Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.	108
Gerard Manley Hopkins	It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.	108
Jess Walter	My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.	108
Johann Georg Hamann	Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.	108
Laura Riding	Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.	108
Maxine Hong Kingston	Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.	108
Simon Callow	Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.	108
Aaron Neville	So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.	108
Mark Strand	Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.	108
Rene Auberjonois	At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine, so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz, where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature, poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.	108
Anatole Broyard	Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.	108
June Jordan	Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.	108
Randall Jarrell	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.	108
Alfred de Musset	Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.	108
James Joyce	Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.	109
E. M. Forster	The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.	109
Earl Sweatshirt	I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah. I've heard that so much, growing up in a house with poetry. But I think people like to use that as a shortcut for who's good and who's not. It's like the word 'lyrical' - 'lyrical' is the worst word in the entire world.	109
Isaac Rosenberg	Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.	109
Patti Smith	What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.	109
Richard Eyre	Naming a baby is an act of poetry, for many people the only creative moment of their lives.	109
Carol Ann Duffy	Poetry and prayer are very similar.	109
Dennis Potter	Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.	109
James Laughlin	Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.	109
Peter Abrahams	With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.	109
Robert Morgan	The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.	109
Theodore Sturgeon	Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.	109
Christina Perri	I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.	109
Edith Hamilton	None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.	109
Philip Levine	My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.	109
Sarah Kay	Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.	109
Diane Wakoski	Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.	109
James Fenton	Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.	109
Martin Cruz Smith	I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.	109
Tomas Transtromer	Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.	109
Mark Strand	I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.	109
Robert Hass	Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'	109
Simon Armitage	I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.	109
John Crowe Ransom	And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.	109
John Keats	Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.	110
Charlie Sheen	I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.	110
K'naan	The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.	110
Paul Dirac	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.	110
Paul Muldoon	The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.	110
Tara Brach	If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.	110
Umberto Eco	When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.	110
Vikram Seth	You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know.	110
Wilfred Owen	Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.	110
Carol Ann Duffy	Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.	110
Christopher Fry	Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.	110
Eleanor Catton	Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time.	110
Lafcadio Hearn	It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.	110
Peter Davison	My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.	110
Richard Serra	On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.	110
Robert Morgan	Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.	110
Will Cuppy	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.	110
David Antin	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.	110
Eugenio Montale	Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.	110
Goldwin Smith	Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.	110
Juan Felipe Herrera	Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.	110
Knut Hamsun	No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.	110
M. H. Abrams	If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.	110
Robert Pinsky	For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.	110
Story Musgrave	When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.	110
Diane Wakoski	I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.	110
Louis Kronenberger	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.	110
Muriel Rukeyser	If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.	110
Shane Koyczan	For me, poetry was... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.	110
Archie Shepp	In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.	110
Joseph Roux	Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.	110
Michael Cunningham	On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.	110
John Masefield	Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.	110
Jack Prelutsky	Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.	110
John McWhorter	Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.	110
John Muir	The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.	111
Sylvia Plath	Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.	111
Allen Tate	There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.	111
Billy Collins	I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.	111
Federico Fellini	Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.	111
Gwendolyn Brooks	Poetry is life distilled.	111
Howard Nemerov	It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.	111
Nancy Lublin	Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.	111
Nicholson Baker	When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.	111
Paul Muldoon	We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.	111
Philippe Petit	I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.	111
Seamus Heaney	If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.	111
Gaston Bachelard	Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.	111
Jason Mraz	I recently read that it's the left brain that does all that calculating, and the right brain that does the poetry. Somehow I've veered way towards the left. I've been doing it for years. Maybe I do art to balance it out.	111
Lawrence Summers	In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.	111
Peter Davison	I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.	111
Philip Sidney	If you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry... thus much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet; and, when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.	111
Robert Morgan	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.	111
Robert W. Service	Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.	111
Stan Brakhage	Poetry is a totally different art than film.	111
William Ernest Henley	Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.	111
Eugenio Montale	Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.	111
Juan Felipe Herrera	San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.	111
Philip Levine	I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.	111
Ric Ocasek	I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.	111
Muriel Rukeyser	The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.	111
Robert Hass	I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.	111
Sharon Van Etten	I don't want to bury anything in poetry.	111
Juan Goytisolo	In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.	111
Ben Whishaw	I love films. I love music. I love poetry and stories. All of that I feel... I sort of get very excited and fed by.	112
Feisal Abdul Rauf	I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.	112
George Edward Woodberry	The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.	112
Gustave Flaubert	All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.	112
Herschel Walker	My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.	112
Honore de Balzac	Love is the poetry of the senses.	112
Novalis	Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.	112
Raymond Chandler	An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.	112
Carol Ann Duffy	It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.	112
Ray Manzarek	I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.	112
Robert Morgan	The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.	112
Stephen Lang	I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.	112
Tahar Ben Jelloun	Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.	112
Tobias Wolff	I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.	112
Walter Jon Williams	Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.	112
Eugenio Montale	There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.	112
Knut Hamsun	I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.	112
Lascelles Abercrombie	If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.	112
Marilyn Hacker	Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.	112
Philip Levine	The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.	112
Robert Graves	If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.	112
Samantha Morton	I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.	112
Saul Williams	I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.	112
Marguerite Young	I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.	112
Tony Buzan	In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.	112
Mark Strand	A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.	112
Stephen Greenblatt	What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.	112
James Broughton	The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.	112
John Barton	An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.	112
Judy Collins	I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.	112
James Dickey	She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.	112
Allen Ginsberg	I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.	113
Allen Tate	Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.	113
George Matthew Adams	What is more beautiful than a sea of water with a number of white-winged boats skirting its surface? Poetry and beauty contesting with the wind and the waves!	113
Nikki Giovanni	Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.	113
Samuel Taylor Coleridge	Poetry: the best words in the best order.	113
Thomas Hardy	If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.	113
Walter Scott	Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.	113
Yevgeny Yevtushenko	Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.	113
Alice Oswald	If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.	113
Danielle Steel	In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.	113
David Hare	Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.	113
Glen Hansard	If you don't mark your successes, the day your ship comes in could be just another day at the office, and there's no poetry in that.	113
Mahmoud Darwish	Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.	113
Naveen Andrews	I'm not an academic, but I've always loved poetry since I've been small.	113
Norman MacCaig	And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.	113
Peter Davison	Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.	113
Robert Morgan	The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.	113
Andrew Motion	Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.	113
Anne Stevenson	Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.	113
Lisa Bonet	A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.	113
Philip Levine	Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.	113
Azar Nafisi	America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?	113
Bobby McFerrin	I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.	113
James Fenton	Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.	113
Marguerite Young	I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.	113
Mark Strand	Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.	113
James Dickey	I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.	113
Billy Collins	The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.	114
David Lee Roth	Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.	114
David Whyte	Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.	114
E. M. Forster	A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.	114
Franz Grillparzer	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.	114
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.	114
Marilynne Robinson	The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.	114
Natasha Trethewey	I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.	114
Walter Pater	A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.	114
Wislawa Szymborska	I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.	114
Yanni	There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.	114
Adrienne Rich	The moment of change is the only poem.	114
Archibald MacLeish	Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.	114
Maria Shriver	One of my greatest joys is poetry. I read it almost every day, and I've even taken a stab at writing some of my own. A poem I wrote for my mother when she was dying really helped me get through that hard time.	114
Phyllis McGinley	In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.	114
Tahar Ben Jelloun	For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.	114
Lascelles Abercrombie	By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.	114
Sarah Kay	My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me.	114
A. R. Ammons	If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'	114
Ajay Naidu	Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.	114
Mark Strand	I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.	114
James Broughton	Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.	114
Justin Townes Earle	I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.	114
Neil deGrasse Tyson	Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.	115
T. S. Eliot	Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.	115
Percy Bysshe Shelley	A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.	115
Ani DiFranco	Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.	115
Don Marquis	Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.	115
Ezra Pound	And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.	115
Gertrude Stein	Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.	115
Natasha Trethewey	I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.	115
P. J. Harvey	I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.	115
Seamus Heaney	The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.	115
Tom Hodgkinson	Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.	115
A. E. Housman	Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.	115
Archibald MacLeish	Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.	115
Emilio Estevez	I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.	115
Martin Amis	The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.	115
Norman MacCaig	However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.	115
Peter Davison	Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.	115
Salvatore Quasimodo	Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.	115
Tahar Ben Jelloun	Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.	115
John Ciardi	Poetry lies its way to the truth.	115
Philip Levine	There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.	115
A. R. Ammons	Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.	115
Joseph Roux	Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.	115
June Jordan	The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.	115
John F. Kennedy	When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.	116
Leonard Cohen	I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.	116
T. S. Eliot	As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.	116
Audre Lorde	Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.	116
John Ruskin	The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.	116
Allen Tate	I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.	116
Billy Collins	Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.	116
David Whyte	By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.	116
Gustave Flaubert	Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.	116
Howard Nemerov	A lot happens by accident in poetry.	116
Muhammad Iqbal	When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.	116
Seamus Heaney	A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.	116
Viggo Mortensen	Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.	116
Adrienne Rich	Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.	116
Carol Ann Duffy	I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.	116
Mahmoud Darwish	I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.	116
Russell Baker	Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.	116
Edwin Hubbel Chapin	Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.	116
Eugenio Montale	I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.	116
Marilyn Hacker	I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.	116
Joseph Roux	Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.	116
Jack Prelutsky	I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.	116
Jacques Derrida	I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.	117
Alfred Nobel	I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.	117
Billy Collins	I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.	117
David Whyte	Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.	117
Natasha Trethewey	I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.	117
Seamus Heaney	The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.	117
Wallace Stevens	Money is a kind of poetry.	117
Eve Ensler	My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.	117
Michel Houellebecq	I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.	117
Paul Engle	I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'	117
Peter Davison	Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.	117
Shelby Foote	I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.	117
William Shenstone	Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.	117
Lascelles Abercrombie	Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.	117
Charles Olson	I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.	117
James Fenton	My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.	117
Mark Strand	And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.	117
Raoul Vaneigem	The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.	117
Bertrand Russell	The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.	118
Howard Nemerov	I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.	118
Seamus Heaney	The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.	118
A. E. Housman	If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.	118
Cheryl Hines	Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.	118
Joseph Brodsky	Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.	118
Mahmoud Darwish	To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.	118
Paul Engle	I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.	118
Pauley Perrette	I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.	118
William C. Bryant	Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.	118
Maria Mitchell	We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.	118
David Amram	That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music.	118
Mark Strand	A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.	118
John Barton	Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.	118
Jack Bowman	My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.	118
Jack Prelutsky	Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.	118
Arnold Palmer	What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.	119
Caroline Kennedy	The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.	119
Charles Baudelaire	It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.	119
Don Marquis	Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.	119
Horace Walpole	Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.	119
Howard Nemerov	I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.	119
Keith Haring	I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.	119
Colm Toibin	The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.	119
Mahmoud Darwish	The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.	119
Peter Davison	They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.	119
Simon Schama	The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.	119
William C. Bryant	Eloquence is the poetry of prose.	119
Marianne Moore	I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.	119
Misha Collins	Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.	119
James Fenton	English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.	119
John Barton	In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.	119
Jack Prelutsky	Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.	119
Billy Collins	I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.	120
Charles Baudelaire	The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.	120
Niels Bohr	When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.	120
Paul Valery	In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.	120
Renzo Piano	In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.	120
Russell Simmons	I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.	120
Wislawa Szymborska	Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.	120
Lafcadio Hearn	The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.	120
Peter Davison	The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.	120
Salvatore Quasimodo	Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.	120
Chaim Potok	A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.	120
Lascelles Abercrombie	Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.	120
Maurice Saatchi	Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.	120
James Broughton	My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.	120
Billy Collins	Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.	121
Edward Young	There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.	121
F. Sionil Jose	I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.	121
Karen Armstrong	A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.	121
Roberto Benigni	Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!	121
Seamus Heaney	Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.	121
Walter Pater	Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.	121
Mahmoud Darwish	Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'	121
William Shenstone	The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.	121
Lascelles Abercrombie	With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.	121
A. R. Ammons	I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.	121
Edgar Allan Poe	With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.	122
T. S. Eliot	Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.	122
John Ruskin	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.	122
Charles Baudelaire	Always be a poet, even in prose.	122
Franz Grillparzer	Prose talks and poetry sings.	122
Howard Nemerov	I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.	122
Roberto Benigni	I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.	122
Lady Gregory	Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.	122
Peter Davison	But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.	122
Robert Morgan	A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.	122
Satyajit Ray	At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.	122
Jewel	I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'	122
A. R. Ammons	Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.	122
James Fenton	Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.	122
Bob Dylan	I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.	123
T. S. Eliot	Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.	123
Erica Jong	Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.	123
George Edward Woodberry	Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.	123
Helen Thomas	There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.	123
Jim Jarmusch	If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.	123
Lucy Larcom	To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry; blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.	123
Norman MacCaig	When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.	123
Peter Davison	And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.	123
Robert Morgan	Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.	123
A. R. Ammons	The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.	123
Albert Einstein	Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.	124
Rainer Maria Rilke	If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.	124
Fred Durst	You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.	124
John Updike	Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.	124
William Hazlitt	Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.	124
Paul Engle	I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.	124
Andrew Motion	Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.	124
A. R. Ammons	That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.	124
Margaret Atwood	The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.	125
Alejandro Jodorowsky	I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.	125
Billy Collins	There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.	125
David Whyte	There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.	125
F. Sionil Jose	I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.	125
Gary Oldman	I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter...'	125
Wale	Making love is, simply put, poetry in motion.	125
Mahmoud Darwish	I see poetry as spiritual medicine.	125
Maria Shriver	Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It's much more mainstream than anyone thought.	125
Andrew Motion	I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.	125
Thurston Moore	Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.	125
James Fenton	Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.	125
Fyodor Dostoevsky	A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.	126
Percy Bysshe Shelley	Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.	126
Ben Okri	I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.	126
Jorge Luis Borges	Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.	126
Macklemore	Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.	126
Wislawa Szymborska	Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.	126
Mary Quant	The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it.	126
Peter Davison	But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.	126
Rita Dove	The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.	126
A. R. Ammons	Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.	126
Edgar Allan Poe	All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.	201
John Keats	Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.	201
Robert Louis Stevenson	Wine is bottled poetry.	201
David Whyte	It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.	201
Ed Koch	Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.	201
Mary Oliver	Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.	201
Philippe Petit	If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.	201
Seamus Heaney	Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.	201
Jenny Holzer	It's necessary to start most work alone. But I'm tickled to death when I can pull somebody in or join someone, whether it's borrowing poetry or traveling with an associate.	201
Jose Saramago	I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.	201
Matthew Arnold	Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.	201
Sasha Grey	I've been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, 'I want to be a rapper.' But I'm a white girl, not going to be a rapper.	201
Andrew Motion	While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.	201
Ryszard Kapuscinski	The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.	201
Percy Bysshe Shelley	Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.	202
John Keats	Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.	202
Jean de la Bruyere	There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.	202
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?	202
Lena Dunham	You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.	202
Paul Auster	I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.	202
Taylor Momsen	I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.	202
Thomas Babington Macaulay	Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.	202
Carol Ann Duffy	I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.	202
Michael Leunig	Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.	202
Charlie Chaplin	Why should poetry have to make sense?	203
Jim Morrison	Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.	203
Leonard Cohen	I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.	203
Percy Bysshe Shelley	Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.	203
Charles Bukowski	What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.	203
Maria Montessori	How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?	203
Bette Midler	Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.	203
Mary Oliver	One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.	203
Thomas Hardy	Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.	203
Peter Davison	There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.	203
James Fenton	A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.	203
Gilbert K. Chesterton	All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.	204
W. H. Auden	A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.	204
Sylvia Plath	Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.	204
Carl Sandburg	Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.	204
Paramahansa Yogananda	Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives.	204
Walter Savage Landor	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.	204
Wislawa Szymborska	In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.	204
Peter Davison	It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.	204
Terry Eagleton	Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.	204
Daisaku Ikeda	Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.	205
Mary Oliver	People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.	205
Stephen Sondheim	One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.	205
Rita Dove	I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.	205
Joseph Gordon-Levitt	When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.	205
Jeffery Deaver	I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.	205
Sylvia Plath	The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.	206
Anna Quindlen	There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.	206
Caroline Kennedy	Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.	206
Vikram Seth	Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.	206
Rita Dove	Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.	206
Jeffery Deaver	I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.	206
John Barton	My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.	206
Jim Morrison	If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.	207
Lord Byron	A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.	207
Virginia Woolf	Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.	207
Carl Sandburg	When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.	207
Marcel Duchamp	Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.	207
Rita Dove	Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.	207
Jeffery Deaver	But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.	207
Leonard Cohen	I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.	208
William Wordsworth	Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.	208
Felix Dennis	You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.	208
Herbert Spencer	Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.	208
Jean Cocteau	The poet doesn't invent. He listens.	208
Nathaniel Hawthorne	Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.	208
Robin Wright	It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?	208
Rita Dove	There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.	208
William Butler Yeats	We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.	209
Mattie Stepanek	Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.	209
Ezra Pound	Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.	209
Jean Cocteau	A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.	209
John Dryden	Dancing is the poetry of the foot.	209
James Fenton	The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'	209
F. Scott Fitzgerald	For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.	210
Andre Gide	'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.	210
Ben Shapiro	America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.	210
Chinua Achebe	I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.	210
Don Marquis	Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.	210
Nicholson Baker	From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.	210
Samuel Taylor Coleridge	I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.	210
Steve Earle	Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.	210
James Fenton	In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.	210
Vladimir Nabokov	Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.	211
Leonard Nimoy	I did not move into developing or processing color. I stayed with black and white. I still think to this day that I prefer to work in black and white if it has to do with poetry or anything other than specific reality. I have worked in color when I thought it was the appropriate way to express the thought that I was working on.	211
Mario Batali	When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.	211
Seamus Heaney	In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.	211
Rick Springfield	I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.	211
Socrates	I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.	212
J. K. Rowling	On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.	212
Vincent Van Gogh	Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.	212
Felix Dennis	I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.	212
Nicholson Baker	So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.	212
Khalil Gibran	Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.	213
Carl Sandburg	Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.	213
Seamus Heaney	We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.	213
Suzi Quatro	I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you'd expect, huh?	213
Elia Kazan	Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.	214
Felix Dennis	No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.	214
Thomas Mann	Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.	214
Julian Baggini	Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.	214
Rita Dove	I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.	214
Maya Angelou	In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.	215
W. H. Auden	A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.	215
Quincy Jones	Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'	215
Junot Diaz	Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.	215
Emily Dickinson	If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.	216
Percy Bysshe Shelley	Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.	216
Erica Jong	Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.	216
Joseph Joubert	You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.	216
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.	216
Tom Hanks	It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.	216
Jane Campion	I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.	216
Virginia Woolf	Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.	217
Felix Dennis	With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?	217
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.	217
Samuel Taylor Coleridge	Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.	217
Jane Campion	And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.	217
Steve Martin	When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.	218
Paul Auster	I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.	218
Stephen Colbert	I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.	218
Thomas Babington Macaulay	As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.	218
John Ruskin	To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.	219
Ezra Pound	Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.	219
Jill Scott	I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.	219
Lynda Barry	The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.	219
Richard Dawkins	The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.	220
John Berger	Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.	220
Russell Baker	Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.	220
Victor Hugo	Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.	221
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.	221
Erica Jong	What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.	222
Jean Cocteau	Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.	222
Russell Baker	I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.	222
Lord Byron	Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!	223
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam	Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.	223
David Hockney	Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.	223
Elizabeth Edwards	I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.	223
Paul Auster	I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.	223
Mohsin Hamid	Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.	223
Carl Sandburg	I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.	224
Denis Diderot	Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.	224
Seamus Heaney	The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.	224
Emily Dickinson	There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.	225
Jean-Paul Sartre	Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.	225
Felix Dennis	Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.	226
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.	226
Robert Browning	God is the perfect poet.	226
T. S. Eliot	Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.	301
George Will	There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.	301
Gustave Flaubert	Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.	301
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.	301
Muhammad Iqbal	Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.	301
Joyce Carol Oates	When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.	301
James Buchan	Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.	301
J. K. Rowling	Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.	302
Muhammad Iqbal	If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.	302
Willem Dafoe	You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.	302
Pink	I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.	303
Seamus Heaney	Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.	304
Erica Jong	I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.	305
Taylor Swift	Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.	306
Seamus Heaney	I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.	306
W. H. Auden	Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.	307
Seamus Heaney	In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.	307
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.	308
Richard M. Nixon	In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.	310
Carl Sandburg	Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.	310
Wole Soyinka	I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.	310
Tom Waits	I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.	311
Michael Leunig	Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.	311
P. J. O'Rourke	It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.	312
Robert Frost	A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.	313
David Duchovny	Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.	313
T. S. Eliot	The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.	314
William Hazlitt	Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.	315
Edmund Burke	Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.	316
W. H. Auden	Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.	317
Annie Besant	Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.	317
Jill Scott	I was reading poetry to my girlfriends, and they were like, 'You're really good. You should go to some poetry readings or something.' And I eventually went and got a, you know, somewhat of a name for myself and a little bit of a following.	317
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel	If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.	318
Robert Frost	Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.	319
Aristotle	Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.	320
Gilbert K. Chesterton	The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.	320
Aung San Suu Kyi	Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.	320
Joni Mitchell	I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.	320
Carl Sandburg	We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.	321
Patti Smith	The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.	321
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Personality is everything in art and poetry.	323
William Blake	Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.	323
Amy Winehouse	I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.	325
Andrea Bocelli	What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.	325
Steven Pinker	Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.	326
Junot Diaz	Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.	326
Eminem	I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.	401
Robert Frost	Poetry is what gets lost in translation.	401
Horace	No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.	403
Patti Smith	When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.	404
Joyce Carol Oates	If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?	405
Robert Frost	Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.	407
Margaret Atwood	When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.	408
Patti Smith	I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.	408
Viggo Mortensen	On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.	408
Johnny Depp	The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.	410
Dave Grohl	There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.	412
Camille Paglia	I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.	417
Viggo Mortensen	I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.	417
Neil Gaiman	I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.	418
Maya Angelou	I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.	421
Oscar Wilde	A poet can survive everything but a misprint.	421
Helen Fisher	People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love.	422
Eminem	I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.	424
Aristotle	Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.	426
Samuel Johnson	Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.	501
Marilyn Monroe	I read poetry to save time.	503
Maya Angelou	I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.	504
Salman Rushdie	A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.	504
Plato	Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.	506
Taylor Swift	I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.	506
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Superstition is the poetry of life.	509
Voltaire	One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.	511
Alice Walker	Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.	518
Maya Angelou	I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.	520
H. L. Mencken	Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.	523
Daniel Radcliffe	Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.	524
Maya Angelou	I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.	526
Steven Wright	I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.	602
Margaret Atwood	I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.	604
Maya Angelou	Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes... whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber... they're listening to poetry.	605
Alice Walker	For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.	608
Maya Angelou	I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.	611
Maya Angelou	I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.	618
Victor Hugo	In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.	625
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.	702
P. J. O'Rourke	There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.	720
Henry David Thoreau	I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.	723
Victor Hugo	The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.	724
Neil deGrasse Tyson	We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.	803
Oscar Wilde	All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.	815
Richard Dawkins	I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.	818
Maya Angelou	The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.	910
Richard Dawkins	I love romantic poetry.	1007

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