Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Poetry.
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
June Jordan
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.
Robert Morgan
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.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
I'm hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career - they are so fun and witty.
Louise Jameson
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend's success.
Oscar Wilde
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
Nicholson Baker
Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
Language is fossil Poetry.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, The U
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
James Broughton
But you hate poetry!Yes, but you make me want to write it.
Cassandra Clare
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Virginia Woolf
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
John Masefield
I love romantic poetry.
Richard Dawkins
She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.
Bob Dylan
A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school. (Act 2, scene 2)
William Shakespeare
I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.
Albert Camus
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
