Famous Quotes: Poetry

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.
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Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
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Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.
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Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
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Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
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I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
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I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.
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A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
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Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
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I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
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Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
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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.
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So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
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In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
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More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry.
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I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
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I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
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All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
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Poetry and prayer are very similar.
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