Top 1000 Poetry Quotes & Sayings

In school I was sidelined by Tamil language teachers. But in the film industry, I got interested in Tamil poetry after reading and working with the Vairamuthu.

I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

Every single soul is a poem.

Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

I read poetry to save time.

One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.

How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Poetry is meant to be heard.

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.

Lizzie Magie was a pretty astonishing woman. She was an outspoken feminist, she had acted, she had done some performing, she had written some poetry, and she was a game designer.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.

The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.

I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.