3 December 2020 James Laughlin I think there’s no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.
3 December 2020 Anatole Broyard Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
3 December 2020 John Drinkwater The musician – if he be a good one – finds his own perception prompted by the poet’s perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.
3 December 2020 Leonard Cohen I never really liked poetry readings I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
3 December 2020 John C. Ransom And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.
3 December 2020 Adrian Mitchell Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.
3 December 2020 Peter Davison My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they’re embarrassed that I write it or they’re embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.
3 December 2020 Wallace Stevens If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
3 December 2020 Jim Jarmusch If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you’ll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
3 December 2020 Archibald MacLeish Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
3 December 2020 John Drinkwater To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.
3 December 2020 John Keats Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
3 December 2020 Samuel Prout Poetry does not consist of words alone there must be sentiment and fancy, combination and arrangement.
3 December 2020 Wallace Stevens In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
3 December 2020 Edith Hamilton None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
3 December 2020 Robert W. Service Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don’t by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
3 December 2020 J. Courtney Sullivan I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats.
3 December 2020 Paul Engle Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
3 December 2020 John Drinkwater It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
3 December 2020 Allen Tate 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.
3 December 2020 Ian Hamilton Finlay Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.
3 December 2020 Carl Sandburg Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
3 December 2020 Niels Bohr When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
3 December 2020 Mark Strand And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
3 December 2020 Toi Derricotte Poetry asks people to have values, form opinions, care about some other part of experience besides making money and being successful on the job.
3 December 2020 Rick Fox Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.
3 December 2020 Lafcadio Hearn There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry – the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
