Poetry quotes

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

Once every five hundred years or so, a summary statement about poetry comes along that we can't imagine ourselves living without.

I am grateful for - though I can't keep up with - the flood of articles, theses, and textbooks that mean to share insight concerning the nature of poetry.