Poetry Quotes

]Sardisoften turning her thoughts here]you like a goddessand in your song most of all she rejoiced.But now she is conspicuous among Lydian womenas sometimes at sunsetthe rosyfingered moonsurpasses all the stars. And her lightstretches over salt seaequally and flowerdeep fields.And the beautiful dew is poured outand roses bloom and frailchervil and flowering sweetclover.But she goes back and forth rememberinggentle Atthis and in longingshe bites her tender mind

Sappho

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Wilfred Owen

Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.

Caroline Kennedy

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

John C. Ransom

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Robert Morgan

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

Alfred de Vigny

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

Ron Rash

Every single soul is a poem.

Michael Franti

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.

Roger McGough

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

Peter Davison

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

Mario Batali

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

Marianne Moore

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

Jean Cocteau

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

Boris Pasternak

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

A. R. Ammons

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

Robert Creeley

To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.

Brian Harris