Top 1200 What Is Poetry Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

We do not enjoy poetry unless we know it to be poetry.

Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision that depends in its intensity on the strength of the labour put into the creation of the poetry.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.

The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.

I think the connection between poetry and theology, which is profound in Western tradition - there is a great deal of wonderful religious poetry - both poetry and theology push conventional definitions and explore perceptions that might be ignored or passed off as conventional, but when they are pressed yield much larger meanings, seem to be part of a much larger system of reality.

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

[The story of Adam and Eve] it's poetry. One must interpret it as poetry. The first 11 chapters of Genesis [the Primeval History] are absolutely remarkable.

It's curiosity, and always a sense of poetry. You see it in particular in the chapter "Iceland" where I'm reciting ancient Icelandic poetry. It has this very beautiful gravitas in conjunction with the volcanoes.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

I've always just liked writing poetry, but it's much later that I've discovered that there's this whole poetry world out there, that you almost have to be accepted into, like this little club.

I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.

There is something essential and necessary about the immediacy and democracy of poetry. If you look at the history of literature, poetry is the one enduring genre from Homer to Ashbery - no other literary form has lasted as long. The novel is only two or three hundred years old... And yes, it's mainstream if we look back, we often turn to poetry to encapsulate what was going on in a particular moment because it crystalizes the experience in a very condensed and meaningful way.

If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common sense, you can only say that it is rubbish; and in actual fact you cannot so examine it at all, because there is something in poetry which is not in the words themselves, which is not in the images suggested by the words 'O windy star blown sideways up the sky!' True poetry is itself a magic spell which is a key to the ineffable.

In order for poetry to exist there has to be not-poetry to contrast it with.

The maiden Olympics had more to protest about than mere war, though. Central to its ethos was a rejection of two establishments the political one, certainly, but also that of the wider poetry world itself. It changed poetry for ever in the UK, ... It led to readings all over the country. You suddenly got more women reading and publishing poems, as well as gay guys and poets from all over the world. Until that time, published poetry had been very university-based white, male, middle-class. We were trying to break poetry out of its academic confines.

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on.

Many other cultures value poetry more than we do. In Ireland, poetry is a top cultural pursuit, the art to end all arts.

I have been writing poetry ever since I was in high school. My poetry mainly concerned the theme of love. And that, of course, is an endless subject.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

'Who's been repeating all that hard stuff to you?' 'I read it in a book,' said Alice. 'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much easier than that, by - Tweedledee, I think it was.' 'As to poetry, you know,' said Humpty Dumpty, stretching out one of his great hands, 'I can repeat poetry as well as other folk, if it comes to that - ' 'Oh, it needn't come to that!' Alice hastily said, hoping to keep him from beginning.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose.

I came into music because I thought the presentation of poetry wasn't vibrant enough. So I merged improvised poetry with basic rock chords. That was my original mission.

I never wrote poetry, just prose. I don't really consider songwriting a form of poetry either. The words are important, of course, but they're dependent on the music.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I'd stopped writing poetry - I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog. And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.

Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case.

I was a violent, self-destructive teenager, who was adopted right at the end of World War II. I was lied to and abused by my parents. I hated life in Utah. I resented the Mormon Church, its sense of superiority and its certitude. I escaped through the Beat writers and discovered poetry and have devoted my entire life to the practice of poetry in varying ways. Poetry gave me a reason for being. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that.

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.

Gluttony and sloth, as worldly goals, were quietly usurped by avarice and lust, which, together with poetry (yes, poetry), consumed all my free time.

Protest poetry -- could there be consensus poetry?

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

My work is based upon contemporary Greek poetry - poetry which is concerned with the problems of today's civilization and, of course, with simple personal feelings of love, nostalgia, etc.

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture - to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.

The United States' poetry emerged when there was a high literacy rate in the United States, even in the 19th century. People read the poetry when it was written. In Ireland, there was a poor literacy rate and people remember that poetry. That was handed on as a memorial tradition.

I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I’m trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both "dream factories."