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Poetry Quotes
"Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers."
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"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."
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"One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry."
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"I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry."
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"Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry."
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"I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that."
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"Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it."
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"Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment."
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"Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry."
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"Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you."
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"I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand."
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"There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever."
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"Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine."
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"It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese."
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"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."
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"There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry."
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"Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it."
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"It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms."
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"Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence."
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"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."
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"Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world."
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"Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid."
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"This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm."
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"An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive."
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