Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Poetry.
Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care that's what poetry is supposed to do.
Diane Wakoski
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
Peter Davison
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Robert Morgan
We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
John Drinkwater
While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.
David Antin
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
Anatole Broyard
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
June Jordan
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Walter Mosley
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Edward Young
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
Joseph Brodsky
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Marianne Moore
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A. E. Housman
They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
I'm not a great poetry fan.
Rupert Everett
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Terry Eagleton
