Poetry Quotes

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

James Buchan

Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.

Walter Jon Williams

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Eugenio Montale

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

James Broughton

I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

We must believe that emotion recollected in tranquillity is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not recollected and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is tranquil only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Mark Strand

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

Laurie Lee

There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better we find comfort somewhere.

Jane Austen

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.

Maxwell Bodenheim

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.

Naguib Mahfouz

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.

Archibald MacLeish

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

Isaac Rosenberg

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.

Harry Mathews

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Dame Edith Sitwell

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

Andrew Motion