Poetry Quotes

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry.