The actors I admire always have something to say, or a level of poetry, belief, activism or intelligence about what they do or how they feel.
— Zawe Ashton
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
— Yusef Komunyakaa
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Maybe I was blessed that my main drive was purely selfish. I needed to make something, make my life better, wider, have poetry in my life, have something that gives me hope on an everyday basis. That was my main drive all along, really.
— Yasmine Hamdan
The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.
— X. J. Kennedy
I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
— Wole Soyinka
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
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
— William Shenstone
I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.
— William Jay Smith
Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.
— William Ernest Henley
Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
— William Collins
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
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
— Wilfred Owen
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
— Walter Savage Landor
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.
— Walter Pater
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
— Walter Jon Williams
I define poetry as celebration and confrontation. When we witness something, are we responsible for what we witness? That's an on-going existential question. Perhaps we are and perhaps there's a kind of daring, a kind of necessary energetic questioning. Because often I say it's not what we know, it's what we can risk discovering.
You can even express movies and poetry using video games. For those reasons, I've decided to create stories through video games.
— Yoko Taro
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
When I read the Koran or hear it read, the images and the poetry, the sound of the language is very inspiring.
When I rap, I get to express myself in a way where putting words together is like poetry, and sometimes it's better to talk in certain expressions than sing, you know? So I love, I love to rhyme when I want to express certain things.
— Wyclef Jean
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.
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.
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
— William Wordsworth
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
— William Rose Benet
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
— William Hazlitt
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
— William Cullen Bryant
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
— William Butler Yeats
I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.
— Will Cuppy
Lamantia is faith building, encouraging poetry in that it abstractly hugs you by finally capturing the inexpressible. It's an experience similar to relief, reading his poems.
— Weyes Blood
Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
— Wallace Stevens
Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
I grew up in Jerusalem and went to school here. I studied at the Hebrew University - mostly Islam and Arabic: Arab literature, Arab poetry and culture, because I felt like we are living in this region, in the Middle East, and we are not alone: There are nations here whose culture is Arab.
— Yitzhak Navon
I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
— Yehuda Amichai
There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.
— Yanni
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
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.
Poetic talent doesn't operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.
I believe that poetry should communicate.
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.
— William Blake
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
— Walter Scott
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
— Walter Mosley
