Poetry Quotes

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

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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.

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.

There's a great deal of poetry in working out how things work, cutting bits of metal, trying to mend stuff.

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.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

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.

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.

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