Poetry Quotes

"Poetry is fact given over to imagery"

"Poetry is composing for the breath."

"A grain of poetry suffices to season a century."

"As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry."

"I simply came to the conclusion that I could write [dialect poetry] as well, if not better, than anybody else I knew of, ... and that by doing so I should gain a hearing. I gained the hearing, and now they don't want me to write anything but dialect."

"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."

"The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover."

"We've hadour wisdom wrungfrom emotion's spongeand yet it still drips"

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."

"Jay Wright's poetry is lyrical, musically intense, and imagistically vivid."

"Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest . . ."

"I guess a lot of the questions in poetry can only be answered by poetry. That is they can only be answered by dramatizing and intensifying the contradictions which we suppress in everyday life in order to get on with it."

"They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it."

"I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length."

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

"Glorious, stirring sight! The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today-in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped-always somebody else's horizon! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!"

"Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you."

"In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well"

"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."

"Poetry: the best words in the best order"