Poetry Is Quotes

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
- Lascelles Abercrombie

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
- Lascelles Abercrombie

My art is that of the 35mm kind; my poetry is of the lead and ink kind; my happiness is of the product of both; and my legacy is of the story of my soul, that my life left behind
- Jeremy Aldana

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
- Vicente Aleixandre

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
- Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
- Paul Engle

Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.
- Cassandra Clare

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'
- A R Ammons

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
- A R Ammons

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
- A R Ammons

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
- Plato

History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
- Aristotle

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
- Aristotle

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
- Aristotle

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
- Matthew Arnold

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
- Antonin Artaud

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
- Antonin Artaud

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
- Brooks Atkinson

He who sees a play that is regular, and answerable to the rules of poetry, is pleased with the comic part, informed by the serious, surprised at the variety of accidents, improved by the language, warned by the frauds, instructed by examples, incensed against vice, and enamoured with virtue; for a good play must cause all these emotions in the soul of him that sees it, though he were never so insensible and unpolished.
- Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
- W H Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
- W H Auden

Although you be, as I am, one of those
Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose,
For poetry is magic: born in sin, you
May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you.
- W H Auden

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
- Gaston Bachelard

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
- Gaston Bachelard

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
- Horace Walpole

Poetry is prose in slow motion.
- Nicholson Baker

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
- Russell Baker

All bad poetry is sincere.
- Oscar Wilde

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.
- Oscar Wilde

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
- Julian Barnes

Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools.
- John Barton

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
- John Barton

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.
- Marvin Bell

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
- Anne Sexton

TIMMS: I don't see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry's about hasn't happened to us yet.
HECTOR: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here, boys.
LOCKWOOD: Fucking Ada.
HECTOR: Poetry is the trailer! Forthcoming attractions!
- Alan Bennett

Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows.
- Aase Berg

Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.
- Henry Beston

IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works.
A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas.
- Hakim Bey

If poetry is outta style then I wish to bring it back
- Justin Bienvenue

I think that poetry is perfect for women raising children, with just bits of time and such need to connect to other women out of the isolation of motherhood.
- Francesca Lia Block

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
- Maxwell Bodenheim

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library... Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
- Jorge Luis Borges

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
- Samuel Johnson

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.
- Samuel Johnson

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
- Jack Bowman

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
- Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is life distilled.
- Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is simple when you write what you see and feel, searching for the words only makes it difficult
- Rayvon L Browne

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 C Bryant

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
- Robert Frost

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
- Robert Frost

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
- Robert Frost

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
- Robert Frost

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
- Charles Bukowski

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
- Edmund Burke

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 all that is worth remembering in life.
- William Hazlitt

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
- James Branch Cabell

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.
- Gilbert K Chesterton

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
- Raymond Chandler

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
- Paul Celan

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
- Edwin Hubbel Chapin

A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.
- Stephen King

If a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.
- John Ciardi

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
- Lucille Clifton

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
- Jean Cocteau

Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.
- Andrei Codrescu

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?
- J M Coetzee

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
- Leonard Cohen

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
- Leonard Cohen

...the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry...

- Billy Collins

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.
- Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
- Edgar Allan Poe

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
- Virginia Woolf

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
- Peter Davison

Poetry is composing for the breath.
- Peter Davison

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.
- Peter Davison

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
- Peter Davison

Poetry is just so emo,' he said. 'Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.
- John Green

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

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe
- James Dickey

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.
- Emily Dickinson

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
- Lord Alfred Douglas

If we're going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It's the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.
- Rita Dove

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
- Rita Dove

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.
- Edward Dowden

Poetry is not the most important thing in life... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
- Dylan Thomas

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.
- John Drinkwater

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.
- John Drinkwater

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
- John Drinkwater

The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
- Milan Kundera

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
- Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
- Huston Smith

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world.
- Richard Eberhart

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
- Umberto Eco

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
- George Orwell

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
- T S Eliot

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
- T S Eliot

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
- Don Marquis

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
- Don Marquis

If poetry is what you live for then do it write.
- R M Engelhardt

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
- George Farquhar

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.
- Craig Ferguson

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
- Robert Fitzgerald

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
- Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
- Gustave Flaubert

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
- Gustave Flaubert

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.
- Stephen Fry

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
- Dennis Gabor

Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
- Philip Larkin

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
- Thomas Hardy

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
- Khalil Gibran

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
- Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
- Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is a game of loser-take-all.
- Jean Luc Godard

Poetry has an immediate effect on the mind. The simple act of reading poetry alters thought patterns and the shuttle of the breath. Poetry induces trance. Its words are chant. Its rhythms drumbeats. Its images become the icons of the inner eye. Poetry is more than a description of the sacred experience; it carries the experience itself.
- Ivan M Granger

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
- Robert Graves

Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bittersweet mixture for all possible household emergencies and its action varies accordingly as it is taken in a wineglass or a tablespoon, inhaled, gargled or rubbed on the chest by hard fingers covered with rings.
- Robert Graves

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
- Thomas Gray

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
- Thom Gunn

I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in..
- Donald Hall

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
- Johann Georg Hamann

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
- David Hare

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
- Seamus Heaney

Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
- Lafcadio Hearn

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.
- Tom Holt

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.
- Nick Hornby

Poetry is telling something to someone.
- Marie Howe

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
- Ted Hughes

The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
- Ted Hughes

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
- Muhammad Iqbal

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
- Muhammad Iqbal

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
- Jim Jarmusch

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
- Jim Jarmusch

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.
- Tahar Ben Jelloun

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
- Tahar Ben Jelloun

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
- Tahar Ben Jelloun

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
- Tahar Ben Jelloun

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
- Jerry B Jenkins

For me, poetry is always a search for order.
- Elizabeth Jennings

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
- Juan Ramon Jimenez

I think poetry is best read to oneself.
- Rickie Lee Jones

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.
- Erica Jong

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
- Erica Jong

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
- June Jordan

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
- June Jordan

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
- Elia Kazan

The best answer I can give is that poetry is all about the effect it has on a reader, and Robert Frost was very, very good at that. If you're asking whatit MEANS that the line is repeated [and miles to go before I sleep] I'd have to say I don't know. It's stylistic. But the effect is pretty clear.
- Haven Kimmel

No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.
- Barbara Kingsolver

Prose is walking; poetry is flying
- Galway Kinnell

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment
- Galway Kinnell

Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.
- Katerina Stoykova Klemer

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

The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
- Jacques Lacan

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
- James Laughlin

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.
- Dorianne Laux

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody.
- Joshua Logan

Poetry is the language of the soul;
Poetic Prose, the language of my heart.
Each line must flow as in a song,
and strike a chord that rings forever.
To me, words are music!
- Lori R Lopez

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")
- Audre Lorde

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
- Audre Lorde

... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
- Audre Lorde

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
- Audre Lorde

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
- James Russell Lowell

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.
- Thomas Lynch

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.
- Gregory Maguire

Only in Russia poetry is respected it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?
- Osip Mandelstam

I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry herea sign of unparalleled respectbecause they are still capable of living by it.
- Osip Mandelstam

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
- John Masefield

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.
- Harry Mathews

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
- Phyllis Mcginley

Poetry that tames language into tight structures and yet manages to move us comes off as a feat, paralleling ballet or athletic talent in harnessing craft to beauty. When poetry is based on a less rigorous, more impressionistic definition of craft, its appeal depends more on whether one happens to be individually constituted to "get it" for various reasons. The audience narrows: poetry becomes more like tai chi than baseball.
- John H Mcwhorter

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
- W S Merwin

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.
- Adrian Mitchell

Poetry is dancing with words.
- Ana Monnar

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
- Eugenio Montale

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
- Eugenio Montale

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
- Marianne Moore

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
- Marianne Moore

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
- Robert Morgan

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
- Robert Morgan

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
- Robert Morgan

Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
- Robert Morgan

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.
- Robert Morgan

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
- Robert Morgan

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.
- Robert Morgan

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
- Robert Morgan

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.
- Robert Morgan

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.
- Andrew Motion

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
- Andrew Motion

Poetry is language playing with itself.
- Harryette Mullen

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
- Story Musgrave

in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
- Vladimir Nabokov