All Quotes

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

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.
‐‐ Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
‐‐ James Fenton

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.
‐‐ David Whyte

Poetry comes alive to me through recitation.
‐‐ Natalie Merchant

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.
‐‐ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
‐‐ Gertrude Stein

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.
‐‐ David Lehman

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.
‐‐ Franz Wright

Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.
‐‐ Asghar Farhadi

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
‐‐ James Joyce

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
‐‐ F. Sionil Jose

Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.
‐‐ Robin Coste Lewis

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
‐‐ James Broughton

Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.
‐‐ Lisel Mueller

Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
‐‐ Gioconda Belli

Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
‐‐ Eileen Myles

Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.
‐‐ David Whyte

Poetry had far better imply things than preach them directly... in the open pulpit her voice grows hoarse and fails.
‐‐ F. L. Lucas

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
‐‐ Bayard Taylor

Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It's much more mainstream than anyone thought.
‐‐ Maria Shriver

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
‐‐ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
‐‐ H. L. Mencken

Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.
‐‐ Omari Hardwick

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
‐‐ Christopher Fry

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
‐‐ Novalis

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
‐‐ Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
‐‐ Sylvia Plath

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.
‐‐ Vikram Seth

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
‐‐ Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry is a beautiful way of expressing feelings - happy, sad, angry, caring. It's also a way that we share with other people, to help them with those feelings.
‐‐ Mattie Stepanek

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

Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
‐‐ Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
‐‐ Khalil Gibran

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
‐‐ Seamus Heaney

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
‐‐ Tahar Ben Jelloun

Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.
‐‐ Daphne Gottlieb

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
‐‐ Lucille Clifton

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
‐‐ George Farquhar

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
‐‐ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
‐‐ John Masefield

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.
‐‐ Richard Eberhart

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
‐‐ Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
‐‐ June Jordan

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
‐‐ Jim Goetz

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.
‐‐ Jane Hirshfield

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
‐‐ Paul Celan

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
‐‐ Huston Smith