Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Havelock Ellis
Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.
Henrik Ibsen
Poetry gives me a chance to express the way I feel. You name it, I'll write it.
Sequoia Mckinney
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
For poetry there exists neither large countries nor small. Its domain is in the heart of all men.
Giorgos Seferis
I simply came to the conclusion that I could write [dialect poetry] as well, if not better, than anybody else I knew of, ... and that by doing so I should gain a hearing. I gained the hearing, and now they don't want me to write anything but dialect.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
William Carlos Williams
We might call them schmaltzy, but it's poetry, and people are reading it or giving it as gifts.
Wayne Lawson
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
Lucille Clifton
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
Alfred Edward Housman
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
John Keats
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
Randall Jarrell
Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry.
Denise Levertov
It is from the quiet and secluded scene of beauty found in the Arabian court-garden that Arabic poetry traces its beginnings.
Kamel Louafi
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
Isaac Rosenberg
There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.
Henry R. Luce
Much of his poetry would come from something happening inside of him. It was always something that he could relate to. He wrote about everything, his son, his daughter, he even wrote about Leonard Bernstein. He could write about almost anything, except he did not like to be told what to write.
Celia Jacobowitz
Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.
David Hunt
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
Paul Auster
Poetry is kind of a below-the-radar thing with a lot of people, and we want to show people that it can be really stimulating and fun.
Jim Graves
. . . poetry, 'The Cinderella of the Arts.'
Harriet Monroe
I guess a lot of the questions in poetry can only be answered by poetry. That is they can only be answered by dramatizing and intensifying the contradictions which we suppress in everyday life in order to get on with it.
Robert Hass
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Czeslaw Milosz
The very heart of the American enterprise has been taken up by the material and by power, ... It's not the kind of country [where] you'd expect to see poetry flower.
Galway Kinnell
The cliche is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in cliches, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.
Gerald Brenan
Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Philip Levine
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
Stephen Leacock
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
William Shenstone
I've got this funny feeling, you know, that I've done my poetry, written my poetry; been there, done that, don't want to go back.
Douglas Dunn
Lyric poetry is by its very nature elegiac - we write about what in fact is already slipping away from us.
Paul Mariani
Both songs were just reactions to what happened down there. You just try to express what happens to you in life, through your music or poetry or whatever.
Fred Leblanc
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
Peter Davison
[My poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.
Robert Hayden
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
Her poetry, which she uses to examine her deepest feelings, is beautifully crafted, She's developed very rapidly into a powerful poet.
Kate Kelly
Most of the lyrics, if you listen to the poetry of hip-hop, is about taking a devastating situation and making it better, coming up out of poverty.
Ben Chavis
Whoever, when he dies, leaves on paper a beautiful line of poetry has left the heavens richer and the earth too.
Fernando Pessoa
Jim Wright was one of the best proponents of geography poetry. America is always about neighborhood. Jim Wright's neighborhood was Martins Ferry and the Ohio River.
Michael Harper
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
William Wordsworth
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
Jean De La Bruyere
Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
Vicente Aleixandre
It really just confirmed that, as she always said - 'poetry is my first love'.
Pamela Gordon
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Edith Hamilton
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
Erik Satie
The question has been asked, 'What is a woman?' A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
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