Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Poetry.
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
James Dickey
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.
Lafcadio Hearn
Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
Aldous Huxley
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Carl Sandburg
I came here to be for all and with all,and what I do today in my solitudewill be echoed tomorrow by the multitude.What I say now with one heartwill be said tomorrow by thousands of hearts...
Kahlil Gibran
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity --it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Phili
The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.
L. Schefer
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Wallace Stevens
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Poetry is its own medium it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
Story Musgrave
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
John Barton
Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
Robert Morgan
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster
I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'
Jewel
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
Michael Tippett
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
Philip Levine
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
