Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a ‘read,’ commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself. – Joseph Brodsky
I don’t think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don’t come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. – Judy Collins
Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic. – John Darnielle
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse. – James Fenton
Children seem naturally drawn to poetry – it’s some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves. – Jack Prelutsky
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme. – James Fenton
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. – John Updike
People who buy ‘The National Enquirer’ would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I’m absolutely serious. – Joseph Brodsky
I’ve been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do – you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That’s the point of poetry. You’re supposed to go, ‘Hmmmm,’ and ‘Woooh!’ – Jill Scott
The founding father of Albanian literature is the nineteenth-century writer Naim Frasheri. Without having the greatness of Dante or Shakespeare, he is nonetheless the founder, the emblematic character. He wrote long epic poems, as well as lyrical poetry, to awaken the national consciousness of Albania. – Ismail Kadare
I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing ‘Burial Rites,’ I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry. – Hannah Kent
Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different. – Ian Hamilton Finlay
As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper. – Goldwin Smith
Poetry can tell us about what’s going on in our lives – not only our personal but our social and political lives. – Juan Felipe Herrera
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it’s not simply telling a story. – Jose Saramago
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read. – James Fenton
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe, they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick! – Jonas Mekas
American poetry is this country’s greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see some things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger. – Joseph Brodsky
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. – James Fenton
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. – John Ruskin
