Poetry Quotes

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.