Category: Quotes About Poetry

Poetry and prayer are very similar. -Carol Ann Duffy

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. -Pablo Neruda

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. -Jorge Luis Borges

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality. -Azar Nafisi

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

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll. -Adrian Mitchell

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. -Lascelles Abercrombie

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom. -Wallace Stevens

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. -M. H. Abrams

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry. -Elizabeth Edwards

I write poetry in order to live more fully. -Judith Rodriguez

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. -Robert Adamson

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left. -Robert Staughton Lynd

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

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. -Mark Strand

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

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir. -George Farquhar

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history. -Tahar Ben Jelloun

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both. -Victor Hugo

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. -Wallace Stevens

I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican. -Stevie Smith