Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Poetry.
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
Seamus Heaney
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.
Rita Dove
All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
Saul Williams
Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
James Schuyler
Why should poetry have to make sense?
Charlie Chaplin
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
Harry Mathews
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
Stephen Colbert
And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,He must die a little death each morning,He must swallow his toad and study his vomitas Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.
Delmore Schwartz
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Charles Simic
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Herschel Walker
A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
Paul Dirac
On the other hand, if there's an underlying core of poetry that I go to, I go to the sea. I've lived on the sea all my life. I live on the sea in Cape Breton.
Richard Serra
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Comte de Lautreamont
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
John Ashbery
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
William Carlos Williams
