Poetry Quotes

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

John Updike

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Christopher Fry

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Allen Ginsberg

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

Walter Pater

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

Diane Wakoski

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.

Daniel Radcliffe

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Jim Jarmusch

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.

Saul Williams

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Jeffery Deaver

When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.

Tea Obreht

The crown of literature is poetry.

W. Somerset Maugham

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Sherman Alexie

When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.

Story Musgrave

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Walter Savage Landor

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

Anne Stevenson

Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.

Lafcadio Hearn

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

Arnold Palmer

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

William Hazlitt

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

Vanessa Redgrave