There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
~By Wallace Stevens ~
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
~By Dennis Potter ~
Poetry is life distilled.
~By Gwendolyn Brooks ~
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
~By James Russell Lowell ~
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
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.
~By Louise Jameson ~
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
~By Thom Gunn ~
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.
~By Raoul Vaneigem ~
I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
~By Zona Gale ~
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
~By Matthew Arnold ~
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
~By W. H. Auden ~
Love is the poetry of the senses.
~By Honore de Balzac ~
I have always written poetry but I have never applied it to songwriting.
~By Janine Turner ~
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.
~By Philip Levine ~
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
~By H. L. Mencken ~
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
~By Rita Dove ~
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
~By Edgar Allan Poe ~
Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
~By Amy Clampitt ~
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
~By June Jordan ~
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
~By Joseph Roux ~
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
~By Wislawa Szymborska ~
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
~By Manuel Puig ~
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
~By Victor Hugo ~
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
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.
~By Lafcadio Hearn ~
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.
~By Randall Jarrell ~
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
~By Brooks Atkinson ~
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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.
~By Julio Cortazar ~
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
~By Tom Wesselmann ~
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
~By Richard M. Nixon ~
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
~By John Ruskin ~
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
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.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
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.
~By Hart Crane ~
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
~By George Murray ~
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.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.
~By Edmund C. Stedman ~
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.
~By Jean-Paul Sartre ~
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
~By Norman MacCaig ~
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.
~By George Murray ~
My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.
~By Guy Johnson ~
I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
~By John Donne ~
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.
~By Robert Adamson ~
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
~By Robert Morgan ~
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.
~By Edward Koch ~
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
~By Vanessa Redgrave ~
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
~By Henry David Thoreau ~
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
~By Salvatore Quasimodo ~
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
~By Maria Montessori ~
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
~By Seamus Heaney ~
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.
~By Thomas Mann ~
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.
~By Michael Graves ~
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
~By Mark Strand ~
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
~By John Ruskin ~
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.
~By Huston Smith ~
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
~By Muriel Rukeyser ~
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
~By W. S. Merwin ~
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.
~By Pablo Neruda ~
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
~By Peter Davison ~
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.
~By Nathaniel Hawthorne ~
Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.
~By Andrea Dworkin ~
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.
~By William Shenstone ~
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
~By Czeslaw Milosz ~
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
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.
~By John Millington Synge ~
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.
~By Peter Davison ~
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.
~By John Drinkwater ~
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.
~By Peter Abrahams ~
I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
~By Bobby McFerrin ~
Poetry transforms and redeems the common, the hurtful, the humiliating.
~By Susan Montez ~
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
~By Harry Mathews ~
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
~By Stephen Spender ~
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.
~By John Drinkwater ~
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.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
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.
~By Archibald MacLeish ~
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
~By Edward Young ~
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.
~By Malcolm Wilson ~
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
~By John Denham ~
I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
~By Rick Springfield ~
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
~By Stephen Colbert ~
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.
~By Goldwin Smith ~
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
~By John Drinkwater ~
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
~By Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel ~
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
~By Comte de Lautreamont ~
In the past, poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.
~By John Barton ~
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
~By Gustave Flaubert ~
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
~By Percy Bysshe Shelley ~
It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?
~By Robin Wright Penn ~
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.
~By Sally Kirkland ~
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.
~By Tom Hanks ~
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
~By John Drinkwater ~
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.
~By Steven Pinker ~
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