Poetry Quotes

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

There is a real formula to writing music, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. It's very formulaic. The subject matter that you can address in pop music is somewhat restricted. It just doesn't allow that same emotive quality that you can put into poetry.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.