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Poetry Quotes


"You make autumn misttaste like champagne and turn winter raininto the elixir of life itself."


"Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours."


"I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way."


"The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry."


"Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground."


"There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny."


"Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true."


"Love was never meant to bejust a metaphorbetween the pages of poetry."


"A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."


"There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice."


"I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican."


"I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck."


"From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose."


"The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it."


"Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions."


"Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry."


"The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry."


"Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around."



"Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different."


"That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were."


"Poetry transforms and redeems the common, the hurtful, the humiliating."


"There are some poemsthat we leave behindsome that leave us behindwhile some just livesilentlyin the heartcrumble, sometimesdwindledisappeardieand are rebornwhen you smile again."


"The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee."


"He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech."


"In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets."
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