In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
— Wallace Stevens
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
The crown of literature is poetry.
— W. Somerset Maugham
I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.
— W. S. Merwin
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
— W. H. Auden
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
Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.
— Vivek Oberoi
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
— Vincent Van Gogh
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 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.
Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.
— Viggo Mortensen
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
— Victor Hugo
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
— Umberto Eco
Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.
— Trevor McDonald
Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.
— Tracy K. Smith
I go to a lot of writers conferences and literary festivals that tend to be in college towns or cities, and I'm eager to see what happens if those same texts and those same questions move outside of those areas to smaller rural communities where there are surely people who read and love poetry.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Money is a kind of poetry.
I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
— Voltaire
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
— Virginia Woolf
The main thing for me is to consider sport at an equal level as you would consider mathematics or poetry at school. It's another place where you can send your kids; they can have fun, but you can expect them to have good teachers, and you can expect them to progress.
— Vincent Kompany
Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.
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.
On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
— Vanessa Redgrave
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
I guess the two Manifesto, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love, and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.
— Trevor Dunn
One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image - things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why - is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.
I know my curiosity as a writer and as a person makes me really interested in moving to parts of the country that I haven't explored through writers' festivals or through the kind of campus visits that I do on a regular basis and engaging with people who may be readers of poetry and may not.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Making love is, simply put, poetry in motion.
— Wale
What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
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.
I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.
My own, purely personal view is that reading, study, poetry, and scientific experiment might be more rewarding than a job or children, so I would never advise anyone against university if they're going for the right reasons.
— Victoria Coren Mitchell
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine.
— Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy.
— Trevor Paglen
Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.
Poetry is not the language we live in. It's not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn't the language to which commercial value has been assigned.
