850 private quotes tagged poetry

“We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.” — John Fowles

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“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

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“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

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“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

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“Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” — Charles Simic

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“A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.” — Thomas Harrison

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“However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.” — James Schuyler

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“How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.” — Robert Penn Warren

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“The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.” — Richard Rosen

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“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” — Charles Simic

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“Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.” — Dennis Gabor

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

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

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“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.” — Jim Morrison

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

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“Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.” — Tahar Ben Jelloun

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“But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.” — Lascelles Abercrombie

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“The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.” — Lascelles Abercrombie

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“I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.” — Charlie Sheen

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“Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.” — Jean Cocteau

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“God is the perfect poet.” — Robert Browning

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“Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.” — Virginia Woolf

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“It's not easy to define poetry.” — Bob Dylan

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“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” — Emily Dickinson

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“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.” — George Sand

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