Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Poetry.
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
E. M. Forster
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
Gaston Bachelard
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.
Nicholson Baker
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith
A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
Douglas Dunn
I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
Knut Hamsun
You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
Ellie Goulding
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
David Hockney
Poetry is composing for the breath.
Peter Davison
I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.
Marcus Mumford
The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.
Thomas Love Peacock, letter to S
Teach you children poetry it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Walter Scott
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
Samantha Morton
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
John Drinkwater
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath
Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.
Adrian Mitchell
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
