A Quote by Bob Dylan

It's not easy to define poetry.

Bob Dylan

Quote Topics

Poetry Define Easy

Quote Author

Bob Dylan
American - Musician
Born: May 24, 1941

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

Robert Morgan

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

A. E. Housman

Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.

Robert Pinsky

I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.

James Tate

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

Natasha Trethewey

I don't see how poetry can ever be easy... Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.

Edward Abbey

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry.

Gerald Stern

I keep trying to define poetry, but its so difficult.

Jack Gleeson

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Jack Gleeson

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

John Ruskin

Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality.

Robert Graves

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

Edgar Allan Poe

I don't know that I could really define love. I can't . . . again, it's like trying to define what this creative force is. It's beyond my ability to really define. If I can define it, then it's not it. We're right back to that thing again.