Poetry quotes

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her.

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

Poetry must be made by all and not by one.

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry - which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just dropping into the work and really pouring out my soul.

You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?