c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
— Carl Sandburg
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
— Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
— Carl Sandburg
My work should be seen as poetry.
— Robert Wilson
The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.
— Edward Hirsch
I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.
— Edward Hirsch
Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.
— Edward Hirsch
You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.
— Edward Hirsch
There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.
— Edward Hirsch
When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
— Edward Hirsch
I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.
— Edward Hirsch
The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.
— Edward Hirsch
There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.
— Edward Hirsch
In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
— Edward Hirsch
I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
— Edward Hirsch
I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.
— Edward Hirsch
I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.
— Edward Hirsch
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.
— Edward Hirsch
As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.
— Edward Hirsch
Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.
— Edward Hirsch
Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.
— Edward Hirsch
The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
— Edward Hirsch
The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.
— Edward Hirsch
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.
— Edward Hirsch
When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.
— Edward Hirsch
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
— Edward Hirsch
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
— Edward Hirsch
I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.
— Edward Hirsch
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
— Edward Hirsch
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
— Edward Hirsch
I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.
— Edward Hirsch
I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.
— Edward Hirsch
The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
— Edward Hirsch
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
— Edward Hirsch
Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
— Edward Hirsch
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.
— Edward Hirsch
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
— Tom Hodgkinson
I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates
One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.
— Mary Oliver
People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.
— Mary Oliver
Poetry is meant to be heard.
— Mary Oliver
You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.
— Fred Durst
I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
— Taylor Momsen
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
— Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
— James Russell Lowell
As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.
— Margo Jefferson
Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.
— Margo Jefferson
Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time.
— Eleanor Catton
Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.
— Claire Tomalin
'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.
— Claire Tomalin
I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late.
— Sue Monk Kidd
Country music especially can get very formulaic - you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.
— Sturgill Simpson
Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.
— Steve Earle
Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
— Steve Earle
Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.
— Steve Earle
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
— Gloria Estefan
Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.
— James Buchan
I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you'd expect, huh?
— Suzi Quatro
There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.
— Rupi Kaur
I would give anything to sing like Beyonce or Adele. I've said many times to my friends that if I could sing like them, I would give up poetry and writing.
— Rupi Kaur
Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.
— Rupi Kaur
'Milk and Honey' was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.
— Rupi Kaur
For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means.
— Rupi Kaur
'Hamilton' is, of course, closely tied to the Obamas because Lin first performed the opening number at a White House poetry jam.
— Phillipa Soo
I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
— Rick Springfield
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
— Denis Diderot
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
— Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
— Ed Koch
You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.
— Willem Dafoe
As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.
— Donald Hall
Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.
— Donald Hall
After a couple of years of public high school, I went to Exeter - an insane conglomeration of adolescent males in the wilderness, all of whom claimed to hate poetry.
— Donald Hall
I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.
— Donald Hall
I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
— Donald Hall
For better or worse, poetry is my life.
— Donald Hall
Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye.
— Donald Hall
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
— Donald Hall
In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
— Donald Hall
Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
— Donald Hall
I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
— Donald Hall
When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.
— Donald Hall
Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.
— Donald Hall
A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.
— Russell Smith
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. 
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.
— Lisa Marie Presley
When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.
— Daniel Woodrell
I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.
— Daniel Woodrell
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.
— Alice McDermott
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
— Alice McDermott
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.
— Alice McDermott
Making love is, simply put, poetry in motion.
— Wale
I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
— Janet Fitch
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
— Simon Schama
Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.
— Simon Schama
As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.
— Simon Schama
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
— Simon Schama
The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.
— Lynda Barry
Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
— John Dryden
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
— Russell Baker
Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
— Russell Baker
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.
— Jose Saramago
Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.
— Rita Dove
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
— Rita Dove
There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry.
— Rita Dove
I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.
— Rita Dove
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
— Rita Dove
The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.
— Rita Dove
I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.
— Rita Dove
Not too many people know it, but when I was in junior high, I was a pretty tough kid and was the leader of a street gang. Well, OK, it was less a street gang than an Ecology Club. We were pretty intimidating, though, and had our own meeting room until we got run out of there by a bunch of thugs from the Poetry Society.
— W. Bruce Cameron
I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.
— Natasha Trethewey
From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.
— Natasha Trethewey
Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.
— Natasha Trethewey
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.
— Natasha Trethewey
I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.
— Natasha Trethewey
My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.
— Natasha Trethewey
I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.
— Natasha Trethewey
Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
— Natasha Trethewey
I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.
— Natasha Trethewey
I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we're not alone - for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone - but also to help us celebrate our joys. That's why so many people I know who've gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.
— Natasha Trethewey
Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.
— Natasha Trethewey
'NewsHour' is very interested in poetry, but they're also interested in not just that something's cute to add on at the end of their programming, but something that actually is integrated into the news.
— Natasha Trethewey
I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.
— Natasha Trethewey
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
— Manuel Puig
I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.
— Vikram Seth
You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know.
— Vikram Seth
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
— Vikram Seth
Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do.
— Vikram Seth
Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.
— Vikram Seth
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
— Vikram Seth
The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it.
— Mary Quant
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
— Jean Cocteau
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
— Jean Cocteau
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
— Jean Cocteau
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
— Colm Toibin
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
— Havelock Ellis
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.
— Mario Batali
I actually remember celebrating National Poetry Day at school I remember having to write and read a load. 
— Tinie Tempah
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
— Terry Eagleton
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
— Terry Eagleton
When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.
— Jamila Woods
I have a band called M&O. We were working on our first album in 2011 or 2012. We were looking for people to collaborate with, and I met Chance through a Young Chicago Authors poetry slam.
— Jamila Woods
It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.
— Jamila Woods
My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.
— Jamila Woods
I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.
— Jamila Woods
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
— Robert Morgan
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
— Robert Morgan
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
— Robert Morgan
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.
— Robert Morgan
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
— Robert Morgan
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
— Robert Morgan
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
— Robert Morgan
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
— Robert Morgan
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
— Robert Morgan
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
— Robert Morgan
I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
— Robert Morgan
I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
— Robert Morgan
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
— Robert Morgan
I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
— Robert Morgan
I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.
— Robert Morgan
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
— Robert Morgan
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
— Robert Morgan
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
— Robert Morgan
What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.
— Robert Morgan
The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
— Robert Morgan
Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
— Robert Morgan
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.
— Robert Morgan
And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.
— Jane Campion
As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.
— Jane Campion
I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.
— Jane Campion
Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.
— Asghar Farhadi
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
— James Fenton
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
— James Fenton
English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.
— James Fenton
Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.
— James Fenton
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.
— James Fenton
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
— James Fenton
A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.
— James Fenton
Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
— James Fenton
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
— James Fenton
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'
— James Fenton
One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
— James Fenton
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
— James Fenton
In the winter of 1940, 'The Atlantic Monthly' invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about 'the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.'
— Tom Reiss
Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy.
— Eileen Myles
As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.
— Eileen Myles
I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around.
— Eileen Myles
In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.
— Eileen Myles
Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
— Eileen Myles
Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.
— Eileen Myles
Prose, poetry, and drawings stand side by side in a very democratic way in my work.
— Gunter Grass
I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
— Sally Mann
I lived a pretty chaotic life. I went to England, and I moved around, and there were a lot of things that I was interested in. I wrote poetry. I took photographs. I was a musician and all sorts of things. Nothing brilliant, but I did all these different things.
— Pawel Pawlikowski
Watching and learning from the great Josette Bushell-Mingo, who was playing Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at the time, and then to return to the same stage six months later playing a lead role, was incredible - I fell in love with the poetry and the breadth of the language so much that I didn't want it to end.
— Gugu Mbatha-Raw
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.
— Caroline Kennedy
Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.
— Caroline Kennedy
The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.
— Caroline Kennedy
The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.
— Bruce Dickinson
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay
I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
— Chinua Achebe
I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.
— Jenny Eclair
When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
— Elizabeth McCracken
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.
— David Whyte
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
— David Whyte
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation it's why you never see good poetry in advertising. 
— David Whyte
By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
— David Whyte
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
— David Whyte
Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.
— David Whyte
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.
— Wislawa Szymborska
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
— Wislawa Szymborska
Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. 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.
— 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.
— Wislawa Szymborska
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.
— Lady Gregory
I'm not a great poetry fan.
— Rupert Everett
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
— Ezra Pound
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
— Ezra Pound
In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.
— Danielle Steel
Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.
— Macklemore
I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That's how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.
— Feisal Abdul Rauf
I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.
— Tamsin Greig
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.
— Abbas Kiarostami
My favourite room in my house is easily the top room, which is a bedroom but also a bathroom, with a big, wooden carved bath, two huge fireplaces and a raised bit in the corner for performances. I've had some really lovely parties and poetry readings up there.
— Deborah Moggach
I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.
— Candace Bushnell
I definitely used to write a lot at school. Comic poetry and drawings about people.
— Sally Phillips
Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
— Mary Karr
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
— Mary Karr
Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.
— Mary Karr
Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.
— Cynthia Ozick
I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.
— Ben Okri
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
— Ben Okri
I've been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, 'I want to be a rapper.' But I'm a white girl, not going to be a rapper.
— Sasha Grey
I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.
— Jonathan Galassi
Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
— Jonathan Galassi
I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
— Jonathan Galassi
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
— Jonathan Galassi
I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.
— Jonathan Galassi
Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
— Jonathan Galassi
I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
— Jonathan Galassi
For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
— Tahar Ben Jelloun
I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
— Tahar Ben Jelloun
I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
— Abraham Verghese
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
— Don Marquis
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
— Don Marquis
All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
I gave my voice to poetry.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
My mother was a washerwoman - or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas... in Plano, Texas - who always loved poetry and always loved stories.
— Juan Felipe Herrera
I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.
— Colin Quinn
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
— Samantha Morton
It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.
— Samantha Morton
It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.
— Peter Steele
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
— Herschel Walker
Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.
— Andrew Motion
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.
— Andrew Motion
I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.
— Andrew Motion
In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.
— Andrew Motion
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.
— Andrew Motion
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.
— Andrew Motion
More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.
— Andrew Motion
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
— Edward Young
I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.
— Anya Taylor-Joy
All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.
— Sophie Hannah
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
— Herbert Spencer
I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too.
— Judith Viorst
I thought it would be a funny concept to publish a book about stand-up comedy with Faber, the poetry publisher, and to apply to stand-up the same sort of weight of annotation that you would to a classic work of literature, an epic poem. I thought that would be funny.
— Stewart Lee
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.
— Bernardo Bertolucci
The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.
— Louis MacNeice
Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.
— Louis MacNeice
The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
— Louis MacNeice
The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
— Jose Bergamin
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
— Jose Ortega y Gasset
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
— Wallace Stevens
To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.
— Susan Vreeland
If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.
— Alice Oswald
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
— James Broughton
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
— Howard Nemerov
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
— Marilyn Hacker
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
— Jorge Luis Borges
I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart