I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
— Tracy K. Smith
I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.
The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.
— Tony Harrison
Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry.
Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry.
You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been.
Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.
— Tomas Transtromer
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.
— Tom Stoppard
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
— Tom Hodgkinson
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
— Tobias Wolff
I actually remember celebrating National Poetry Day at school; I remember having to write and read a load.
— Tinie Tempah
Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.
— Tim O'Brien
So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.
— Thomas Lynch
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
— Thomas Hardy
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
— Thom Gunn
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
— Terry Eagleton
Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.
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.
Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?
I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.
For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.
A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.
I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.
— Tom Wesselmann
In the winter of 1940, 'The Atlantic Monthly' invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about 'the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.'
— Tom Reiss
It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.
— Tom Hanks
At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.
— Tobias Hill
I think of myself as an ambassador of the arts. In my heart of hearts, I know the world would be a more peaceful, tender place if we were more moved by the poetry around us.
— Tim Seibles
Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.
— Thurston Moore
But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
— Thomas Gray
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us.
— Theresa Breslin
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.'
You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light.
I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry.
Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.
In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.
— Tony Buzan
I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
— Tom Waits
Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
— Tom Holt
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.
— Tom Glazer
My strong suits, coming from poetry, will naturally be description, which I love doing. It comes very easily, and possibly structure, up to a point.
Mostly, when I travel, I want to represent my own work well and let others know how I feel about poetry being an important part of life.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
— Thomas Mann
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
— Theodore Sturgeon
