“Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.”
Topic
poetry
850 quotes
Quotes, most loved first
“Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.”
“I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.”
“But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.”
“I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.”
“It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.”
“Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.”
“I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.”
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
“Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.”
“Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.”
“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.”
“In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.”
“Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.”
“I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.”
“More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.”
“Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.”
“Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.”
“The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.”
“Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.”
“A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.”
“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.”
“I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.”
“All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.”