Famous Quotes: Poetry

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.
Use this quote  

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.
Use this quote  

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
Use this quote  

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
Use this quote  

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
Use this quote  

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
Use this quote  

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Use this quote  

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Use this quote  

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
Use this quote  

Poetry does not consist of words alone; there must be sentiment and fancy, combination and arrangement.
Use this quote  

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.
Use this quote  

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
Use this quote  

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
Use this quote  

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Use this quote  

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Use this quote  

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
Use this quote  

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.
Use this quote  

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Use this quote  

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Use this quote  

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Use this quote