Poetry

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

I love all kinds of music. My dad's from London, so he loves David Bowie, the Stones, The Clash. I grew up with that influence while loving poetry and loving all kinds of current music.

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

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

The moment of change is the only poem.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry, I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

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.

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.

At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.

One night, I lay awake for hours, just terrified. When the dawn finally came up - the comfortable blue sky, the familiar world returning - I could think of no other way to express my relief than through poetry. I made a decision there and then that it was what I wanted to do. Every time I pulled a wishbone, it was what I asked for.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

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.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry, all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

One of the things I've always liked about my husband is he's very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he's very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.

I had a strong propensity, which I still have, to be invisible. In grade school, I'd try to disappear and become formless. I lived in a very imaginary world. I loved poetry and wrote my first novel when I was 9. It was about a little girl and the people she met in the woods.

I have written some songs, but I would really call what I've done poetry at the end of the day, because I'll sit with my guitar for hours and hours on end for, like, a week and then I won't touch it for a month. I also just have no confidence. And you know what? I don't have time, because I'd rather be doing other things, like knitting.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

The major poets of New Jersey have all suffered, whether it's Whitman, who lost his job for 'Leaves of Grass,' or William Carlos Williams, who was called a communist, or Ginsberg, whose 'Howl' was prosecuted, or myself. If you practise poetry the way I think it needs to be done, you're going to put yourself in jeopardy.

I often read poetry to 'warm up' before I write.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

I don't like scaring people off. When I tell people I'm a writer, they look kind of interested. Then I tell them that I write poetry, and they think I'm weird.

Film and TV are the most popular mediums in America. Literature and poetry are possibly the most under-recognized art forms.

Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.

With contemporary poetry having approximately as many fans outside the immediate field as there are devotees of undergoing knee surgery, any sentient, breathing reader who's genuinely interested in poetry... not scared of it... seems a godsend.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

What is beautiful enchants me. I mean not just physical beauty but a wider concept of beauty. There is beauty in poetry and in great musical or singing performances. There is beauty everywhere if you can just see it.

Romanians have a particular love for poetry and have a beautiful, vivid language. The poets they love are not versifiers like Vadim Tudor, but genuinely complex mystical souls like Mircea Cartarescu.

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations, and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.

I'm looking for a guy who makes you want to dance and write poetry all day long.

Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.

I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

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

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

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

Poetry is not only dream and vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.

Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.

In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.

Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.

Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

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.

Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

I read pretty eclectically - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - and I've been inspired and influenced by a number of writers.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion, and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

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.

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.

I love films. I love music. I love poetry and stories. All of that I feel... I sort of get very excited and fed by.

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger, it helped me to remember a way to write.

I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

I know my voice has a limited range of motion, I don't write dramatic monologues and pretend to be other people. But so far, my voice is broad enough to accommodate most of what I want to put into my poetry. I like my persona, I often wish I were him and not me.

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song, it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.

Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.

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.

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.

We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.

I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.

I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.

There's a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that's a bit blurred in my mind.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

It's not easy to define poetry.

I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

The Scottish Highlands are incredible. There seems to be magic and poetry everywhere.

I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.

The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.

When you're going through something, whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody, you often feel like 'Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed, I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact, poetry's a nice reminder that, no, everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.

What I wrote all the time when I was a kid - I don't want to call it 'poetry,' because it wasn't poetry. I was not that kind of a writer. I was a rhymer. I was a fan of Dorothy Parker's, so maybe I wrote poetry to that extent, but my main focus was the humor of it, and word construction, and the slant. Your words, it's a very powerful experience.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I think book clubs should read more contemporary poetry.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk, get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

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

I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.

Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.

I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.

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.

I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.