Explore Quotes on Poetry

Comedy was something I picked up trying to perfect my art through spoken word. I got on YouTube just to show off my poetry, and then people thought I was funny, so I ran with it.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.

As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield.

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.

It's probably the first type of music we had, rhythm, whether it's poetry or tapping.

I have just discovered the beautiful poetry of Soren Ulrik Thomsen. Danish is not the strongest of languages, but he uses it very well.

It is very difficult to explain poetry. You have to understand the poetry and figure out your own take and your relatability.

As a story teller I have used characters, epic tales, poetry and rasa in my performances.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Like Pinter and Orton, the writer, Clive Exton, catches the poetry of modern everyday speech, which, whether we like it or not, includes four-letter words used as verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives. But, God, is it difficult to learn.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I don't want to bury anything in poetry.

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

For me, poetry was... the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through.