Poetry Quotes

"Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me God of love only knows where."

"We're extremely excited to have Lisa on board. Her communications and arts promotion background, as well as her exposure to the national and local poetry communities, will prove hugely beneficial to us."

"I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat"

"I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... And think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences ..."

"I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table."

"I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it."

"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence their importance."

"I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry."

"I have nothing to say And I am saying it And that is poetry"

"Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying."

"In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself."

"I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible."

"Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry"

"The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry"

"Poetry is a mere drug, Sir."

"A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou"

"Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases"

"Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all. . . . It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there."

"Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield."

"I'm not dismayed that poetry's appeal is limited in scope. That's why we have National Poetry Month. It's a sign of its neglect, which isn't necessarily a negative thing. It's not like we have National TV Month."