Quotes on Poetry

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.

It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.

Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem's all with each verse he writes.

The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.

Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

grow old with me. the best is yet to be. the last of life for which the first was made.

If the poetry world celebrate its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.

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.

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

I am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.