Poetry Quotes

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.

The cliche is dead poetry.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.