Poetry Is Quotes - Page 34

• I always say that photography's closest cousin is poetry because of the way it sparks your imagination and leaves gaps for the viewer to fill in.

  Alec Soth

  Photography, Cousin, Imagination

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• Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

  Elia Kazan

  Acting, Realistic, Prose

  Elia Kazan (2009). “Kazan on Directing”, p.46, Anchor

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• Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

  Gilbert Highet

  Intimate Conversation, Dancing, Needs

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• Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

  John Steinbeck

  Writing, Poetry, Mathematics

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• No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.

  Ezra Pound

  Real, Book, Writing

  Ezra Pound (1918). “Pavannes and Divisions”

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• I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.

  Anne Stevenson

  Believe, Order, Useless

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• 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

  Facts, Wordsworth, Natural

  Walter Pater (1901). “The Works of Walter Pater: Essays from 'The Guardian.'”

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• Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

  Pietro Aretino

  Bells, Cymbals, Madness

  Pietro Aretino (1933). “The Works”

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• Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

  John Drinkwater

  Men, Desire, Matter

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”, p.35, Library of Alexandria

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• 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

  May, Poet, Entertaining

  John Drinkwater (1922). “The Lyric: An Essay”, p.4, Library of Alexandria

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• A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

  Mark Strand

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

  Mark Strand

  Writing, Creative, Program

  "In the Presence of America: A Conversation with Mark Strand". Interview with Katharine Coles, www.weber.edu. 1992.

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• And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

  Mark Strand

  Comfort, Culture, Entertainment

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• I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

  Mark Strand

  Thinking, Personality, Triumph

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• We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Pain, Loss, Frustration

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

  Antonin Artaud

  Reading, Way, Poet

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.78, Grove Press

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• One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.

  James Agee

  Dry Up, Mind, States

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• Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos.

  I. A. Richards

  Mean, Poetry, Overcoming

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• Poetry being ... when we look from the center outward.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Writing, Looks

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• 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

  Believe, Writing, Different

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• 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

  Art, Pieces, Paper

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• 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

  Real, Drinking, Writing

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• I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, Years, Interesting

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• The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Poet, Importance

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• My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

  Thom Gunn

  Teacher, Definitions

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