c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
— Paul Celan
I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
— Tom Wesselmann
Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.
— James Laughlin
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
— Robert Morgan
A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.
— Lisa Bonet
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
— Eugenio Montale
What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.
— Stephen Greenblatt
So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.
— June Jordan
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
— Helen Dunmore
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
— James Dickey
Why should poetry have to make sense?
— Charlie Chaplin
The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
— Virginia Woolf
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
— Erik Satie
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
I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.
— Amy Winehouse
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
— Tea Obreht
The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.
— Martin Amis
I read poetry to save time.
— Marilyn Monroe
The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.
— Graham Joyce
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
— James Fenton
Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.
— Lisel Mueller
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.
— Billy Collins
I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.
— Robert Bringhurst
As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
— N. Scott Momaday
My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.
— George Steiner
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.
— Alice Oswald
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
— F. Sionil Jose
I am for poetry that is admired by peasant and aristocrat alike.
— F. Sionil Jose
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.
— Alice Walker
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
— Seamus Heaney
I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.
— Rebecca Sugar
When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.
— Theresa Breslin
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
— Octavio Paz
Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives.
— Paramahansa Yogananda
I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys.
— Clive Sinclair
I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.
— Bindi Irwin
Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.
— Edward Hirsch
In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
— Fanny Howe
There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.
— Philip Schultz
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.
— Amiri Baraka
I do believe that we've a responsibility to try to acknowledge the range, both geographic and graphic, of what's happening in poetry in English. I'm interested in poems that are first-rate. After that, I'm not too concerned if they come from Queens or Queensland.
— Paul Muldoon
When I get depressed, I try to get something for the terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry.
— Spike Milligan
The applause of his native land is the richest reward to which the patriot ever aspires. It is this for which 'he bears to live or dares to die.' It is the high incentive to those achievements which illustrate the page of history and give to poetry its brightest charm.
— John Tyler
The topics just kind of come to me. If they are relevant, it's because they're happening in the world around me, and it's affecting me. Poetry is my way of dealing with it.
— Rupi Kaur
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
— Emily Dickinson
Money is a kind of poetry.
— Wallace Stevens
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
— Ezra Pound
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.
— Aristotle
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
— Richard Dawkins
Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
— J. K. Rowling
Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
— Victor Hugo
I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.
— Russell Simmons
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
— Seamus Heaney
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.
— Billy Collins
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.
— Denis Villeneuve
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
— Denis Diderot
Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
— Elia Kazan
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
— Rita Dove
The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.
— Natasha Trethewey
I like to borrow forms and quotes and use a lot of allusions, in both poetry and music.
— Jamila Woods
Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.
— Eileen Myles
Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
For this reason poets and artists developed the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake. The community did not appear to need them, so, tit for tat, they did not need the community. This being granted, it was no longer necessary or even desirable to make one's poetry either intelligible or sympathetic to the community.
— Louis MacNeice
Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.
— Louis MacNeice
I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.
— Maya Angelou
I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
— Maya Angelou
I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.
— Maya Angelou
I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
— Maya Angelou
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
— Henry David Thoreau
There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
— P. J. O'Rourke
It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.
— P. J. O'Rourke
I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.
— Taylor Swift
Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
— Taylor Swift
We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.
— Tom Stoppard
Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
You don't have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don't need any special equipment - that's the beauty of it.
— Michelle Obama
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
— H. L. Mencken
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
— Patti Smith
What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
— 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.
— Patti Smith
I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.
— Patti Smith
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
— Victor Hugo
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
— Victor Hugo
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
— John Updike
I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.
— John Updike
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
— Steven Pinker
The fact that Newark is having poetry festivals and peace conferences - all of these things are building an undeniable thesis that our city is making incredible strides forward.
— Cory Booker
On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.
— J. K. Rowling
As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
— Daniel Radcliffe
I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
— Daniel Radcliffe
On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
— Viggo Mortensen
Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.
— Viggo Mortensen
I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.
— Viggo Mortensen
I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'
— Jill Scott
I was reading poetry to my girlfriends, and they were like, 'You're really good. You should go to some poetry readings or something.' And I eventually went and got a, you know, somewhat of a name for myself and a little bit of a following.
— Jill Scott
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?'
— Alain de Botton
Dylan captured what was on a million minds and turned it into poetry. With 'Blowin' in the Wind' or 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' he set a whole new standard.
— Jimmy Iovine
Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.
— Michael Leunig
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
— Margaret Atwood
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
— Margaret Atwood
Americans have been tremendously fortunate in poetry, regarding both the quantity and quality of poetry produced. Unfortunately, it remains in schools and universities; it is not widely distributed.
— Joseph Brodsky
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
— Joseph Brodsky
Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.
— Joseph Brodsky
To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.
— Joseph Brodsky
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.
— Joseph Brodsky
My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.
— Joseph Brodsky
This assumption that the blue collar crowd is not supposed to read it, or a farmer in his overalls is not to read poetry, seems to be dangerous if not tragic.
— Joseph Brodsky
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
— Joseph Brodsky
Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.
— Joseph Brodsky
Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.
— Joseph Brodsky
American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.
— Joseph Brodsky
Tyranny will make an entire population into readers of poetry.
— Joseph Brodsky
American poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger.
— Joseph Brodsky
Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.
— Joseph Brodsky
The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
— Joseph Brodsky
People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.
— Joseph Brodsky
People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love.
— Helen Fisher
Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.
— Nikki Sixx
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
— H. P. Lovecraft
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I'm moved by people who see the world differently than others. People who see the world with a longing for its poetry often can be broken people.
— Laura Dern
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.
— Andrea Bocelli
Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.
— Junot Diaz
I didn't start writing songs, honestly, until I started making my album. I was always doing poetry, but I never thought I could write songs. I discouraged myself and thought it was so hard. But starting this process and learning just what it is to be a songwriter and performer taught me that you don't have to feel discouraged about anything.
— Alessia Cara
In much of computer science, I can easily 'auto-grade' your work and give you an instant meaningful feedback. I can't do this when it comes to the subtlety of human thought, language, poetry, philosophy.
— Sebastian Thrun
I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.
— Annie Lennox
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
— William Hazlitt
Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.
— Kenneth Branagh
Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.
— Aung San Suu Kyi
I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
— Jhumpa Lahiri
It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?
— Robin Wright
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.
— Camille Paglia
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
— Umberto Eco
I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.
— Sylvia Plath
Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.
— David Duchovny
Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
— David Hockney
I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available.
— Satya Nadella
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
— Horace
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
— John Ruskin
There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do.
— Dave Grohl
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.
— George Packer
You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.
— Ellie Goulding
When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.
— Steve Martin
I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.
— Neil Gaiman
We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.
— Jim Harrison
I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.
— Jerry Hall
I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.
— Joni Mitchell
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
— Gertrude Stein
Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.
— Omari Hardwick
I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.
— Omari Hardwick
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
— Omari Hardwick
That's the thing with me being a former athlete: in the way I attack characters and attack poetry is from the base of being an athlete.
— Omari Hardwick
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
— Omari Hardwick
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
— Seamus Heaney
Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.
— Seamus Heaney
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
— Seamus Heaney
Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
— Seamus Heaney
Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.
— Seamus Heaney
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
— Seamus Heaney
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
— Seamus Heaney
The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
— Seamus Heaney
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
— Seamus Heaney
In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.
— Seamus Heaney
In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.
— Seamus Heaney
Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
— Seamus Heaney
Poetry is more a threshold than a path.
— Seamus Heaney
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
— David Mamet
It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.
— Tom Hanks
There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
— Khaled Hosseini
I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.
— Anthony Hopkins
Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.
— Julian Baggini
It would probably surprise people to know that I'm interested in wildlife. I read a lot of poetry, too.
— Sean Bean
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.
— Charles Baudelaire
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
— Charles Baudelaire
In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.
— Gene Luen Yang
Whether you like modern incarnations of what country radio hits are, or you like what I'm doing, or you like something really off in folk, poetry Americana land, it's all just music, man. If you like one of them, great - go buy it.
— Chris Stapleton
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.
— Aaron Neville
I write poetry on my iPhone. I've got about 100 poems on there.
— Aaron Neville
It's more fun to have a name rather than a number. I think this gives our products a personality. I get the names from literature, movies, opera, traveling, nature, poetry, sometimes even the street. I keep a small book that I write in. I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down a name for a lipstick or an eyeshadow.
— Francois Nars
Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.
— Melvyn Bragg
I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.
— Kapil Sibal
I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
— John Darnielle
Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.
— John Darnielle
My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
— John Darnielle
I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.
— Michael Dirda
Most lyric poetry is about love, whether yearned after, fulfilled, or wistfully regretted; what isn't tends to consist of laments and cris du coeur over this, that, and the other.
— Michael Dirda
It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.
— John Cusack
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.
— Annie Besant
I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.
— Leonard Cohen
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others it's for others to use. 
— Leonard Cohen
I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
— Jay Parini
I think of it this way: When you hear that people have downloaded your comic, appreciate that thousands are eager to hear what you have to say. The poetry club down the hall may not have the same problem. That's a good problem to have.
— Mark Waid
Poetry stands or falls by its music.
— John Burnside
My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
— John Burnside
With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.
— John Burnside
I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.
— John Burnside
I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
— Elizabeth Edwards
I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist.
— Philippe Petit
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
— Paul Auster
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
— Paul Auster
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
— W. H. Auden
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.
— Jewel
I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought, 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry,'
— Jewel
Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.
— Amy Tan
When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
— Rhys Ifans
You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
— Lena Dunham
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.
— Amanda Seyfried
I'm moving to Rio permanently with my family. It's one of the places left in the world where people still live with a big charge of poetry on a daily basis. I feel we've kind of lost that here in Europe.
— Vincent Cassel
Every single soul is a poem.
— Michael Franti
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
— E. M. Forster
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
— E. M. Forster
A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named. 
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.
— Justin Cartwright
I used to spend a lot of time dreaming and writing poetry.
— Mohit Chauhan
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.
— Billy Collins
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
My persona is less miserable than a lot of contemporary poetry speakers are.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
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.
— Billy Collins
Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.
— Billy Collins
Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'
— Quincy Jones
I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
— Pink
I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.
— Mark Haddon
I like to write poetry.
— Rebecca Ferguson
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
— Stephen Colbert
You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
— Ethan Canin
I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter...'
— Gary Oldman
You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.
— Felix Dennis
I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.
— Felix Dennis
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
— Felix Dennis
With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?
— Felix Dennis
Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
— Felix Dennis
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.
— Octavio Paz
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
— Octavio Paz
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
— Octavio Paz
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
— Octavio Paz
I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.
— J. Michael Straczynski
Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.
— Tim O'Brien
Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.
— Mohsin Hamid
Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
— Mary Lambert
There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock.
— Douglas Brinkley
That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means. 
— Chuck Berry
My dad was the cause of me being in show business. He was not only in poetry but in acting a bit. He was Mordecai in the play 'A Dream of Queen Esther.'
— Chuck Berry
I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don't rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that's why I do not like him.
— Chuck Berry
All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people.
— Flea
My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.
— Michael Sheen
For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!
— Ellen Key
When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
— J. G. Ballard
Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
— Erica Jong
Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
— Erica Jong
I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.
— 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.
— Erica Jong
Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.
— Erica Jong
In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.
— Erica Jong
I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.
— F. Sionil Jose