3 December 2020 Boris Pasternak 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.
3 December 2020 Horace Walpole Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
3 December 2020 Charles Baudelaire Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
3 December 2020 Socrates I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
3 December 2020 John C. Ransom The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism – how should poetry escape?
3 December 2020 Vicente Aleixandre Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
3 December 2020 Paul Muldoon For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
3 December 2020 Jack Bowman My art and poetry is very political now. Because you’ve got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
3 December 2020 Jane Campion As for how criticism of Keats’ poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I’ll leave that for others to decide.
3 December 2020 Lascelles Abercrombie Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
3 December 2020 John Masefield Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
3 December 2020 Seamus Heaney In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
3 December 2020 Dennis Potter Children can write poetry and then, unless they’re poets, they stop when reach puberty.
3 December 2020 Vladimir Nabokov Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
3 December 2020 Voltaire One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
3 December 2020 Story Musgrave When you’re looking that far out, you’re giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn’t need translation. It’s like poetry, it touches you.
3 December 2020 Christopher Fry 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.
3 December 2020 Charles Baudelaire 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.
3 December 2020 Wislawa Szymborska Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
3 December 2020 Zona Gale I don’t know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
3 December 2020 Peter Davison And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.
3 December 2020 Andrew Bird I don’t write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.
3 December 2020 Erica Jong I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching – but that won’t pay the Bergdorf’s bill. I think I’ll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
3 December 2020 John Drinkwater Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
3 December 2020 Carol Ann Duffy I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.
