Poetry Quotes

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.

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.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

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.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

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.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

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.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

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.

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.