850 private quotes tagged poetry

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”— Leonard Cohen

“I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.”— Carol Ann Duffy

“Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.”— Jacques Maritain

“It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?”— Robin Wright Penn

“Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.”— Ishmael Reed

“Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.”— William C. Bryant

“Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.”— Walter Pater

“Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.”— William Collins

“This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?”— Azar Nafisi

“Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.”— Walter Pater

“Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.”— Horace Walpole

“If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”— Thomas Hardy

“I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.”— Howard Nemerov

“When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.”— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.”— Manuel Puig

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”— Thomas Mann

“No poem is easily grasped so why should any reader expect fast results?”— John Barton

“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”— Jean Cocteau

“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”— Wallace Stevens

“Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.”— Anna Quindlen

“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”— Paul Engle

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.”— Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”— David Carradine

“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”— John Cage