top of page
Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry."

"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

"The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness."

"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."

"My soul is wrapped in harsh repose,Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes,But soft... behold!A sunlight beamButting a swath of glimmering gleam.My heart expands,'tis grown a bulge in it,Inspired by your beauty...Effulgent."
Explore more quotes by Robert Morgan

"What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it."

"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."

"It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience."

"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end."

"If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable."

"I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry."

"I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems."

"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
bottom of page