Poetry Quotes

Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love.

I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

Where the government has got it seriously wrong is to imagine that poetry is about right and wrong answers, that poetry has testable outcomes. It doesn't. Very nearly all poetry is full of ambiguity and suggestiveness.

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.