Poetry Quotes

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

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.

Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

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

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.

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.

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

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.