Poetry quotes

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2, 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.

Music is my thing. It's my thing it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me it's Christmas to me religion to me poetry to me.

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

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.