3 December 2020 Norman MacCaig I never think about poetry except when I’m writing it. I mean my poetry.
3 December 2020 Lynn Johnston And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
3 December 2020 Patti Smith When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock ‘n’ roll was asleep.
3 December 2020 Lascelles Abercrombie But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
3 December 2020 Joseph Brodsky Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
3 December 2020 John Barton If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world, then it has had its desired effect.
3 December 2020 Christopher Smart For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers. For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.
3 December 2020 T. S. Eliot The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
3 December 2020 Gilbert K. Chesterton The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
3 December 2020 Mario Batali When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
3 December 2020 Joseph Joubert You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
3 December 2020 Alfred de Musset Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
3 December 2020 Salvatore Quasimodo He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.
3 December 2020 Antonin Artaud Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
3 December 2020 Huston Smith 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.
3 December 2020 Walter Pater A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
3 December 2020 Franz Grillparzer Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life’s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
3 December 2020 Emily Dickinson If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
3 December 2020 Eugenio Montale True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
3 December 2020 George Oppen The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
3 December 2020 Laura Riding To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
3 December 2020 Steven Wright I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
3 December 2020 Tristan Wilds Well, I write a lot of poetry – that’s where it usually all starts. I definitely want to show you guys sides of me – love, loss, heartbreak – all of that good stuff!
3 December 2020 Nathalie Sarraute One can’t write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don’t like poetry.
3 December 2020 John Barton An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
