Poetry Quotes

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.

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

Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

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

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.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

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.

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.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

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

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

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

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

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

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.

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

I read poetry to save time.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.