All Quotes

Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.
‐‐ David Whyte

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
‐‐ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a totally different art than film.
‐‐ Stan Brakhage

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.
‐‐ Robert Pinsky

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
‐‐ Robert Frost

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
‐‐ Robert Frost

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
‐‐ Adrienne Rich

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
‐‐ Jose Ortega y Gasset

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
‐‐ Marianne Moore

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
‐‐ Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
‐‐ Seamus Heaney

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.
‐‐ Edmund Clarence Stedman

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
‐‐ J. G. Stedman

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
‐‐ Carl Sandburg

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

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
‐‐ Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is as vital as ever. The teaching of poetry reading, however, is sluggish and, often, slovenly. It needs to be expanded in the school curriculum and be more a feature of society at large. The newspapers should all be carrying a daily poem. It should be as natural as reading a novel.
‐‐ Paul Muldoon

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
‐‐ Robert Fitzgerald

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.
‐‐ Andrew Motion

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
‐‐ John Barton

Poetry is composing for the breath.
‐‐ Peter Davison

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
‐‐ F. Sionil Jose

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
‐‐ Thomas Hardy

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.
‐‐ Michael Tippett

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
‐‐ Aristotle

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

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.
‐‐ Mary Karr

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
‐‐ Jean Cocteau

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
‐‐ Karl Shapiro

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.
‐‐ Story Musgrave

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
‐‐ Leonard Cohen

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
‐‐ Rita Dove

Poetry is life distilled.
‐‐ Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
‐‐ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
‐‐ James Branch Cabell

Poetry is meant to be heard.
‐‐ Mary Oliver

Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
‐‐ Seamus Heaney

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.
‐‐ Billy Collins

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
‐‐ Plato

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
‐‐ Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
‐‐ Octavio Paz

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
‐‐ Umberto Eco

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
‐‐ T. S. Eliot

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
‐‐ Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.
‐‐ Tim O'Brien

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

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
‐‐ Patrick Kavanagh