Quotes on Reading Poetry

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Reading poetry and watching cricket were the sum of my world, and the two are not so far apart as many aesthetes might believe.

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

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.