So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work. – Terrance Hayes
All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet. – Stevie Smith
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. – Victor Hugo
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
Poetry allies itself with beauty – a supreme union – but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment. – Saint-John Perse
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. – Soren Kierkegaard
So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us. – Tracy K. Smith
I grew up in Jerusalem and went to school here. I studied at the Hebrew University – mostly Islam and Arabic: Arab literature, Arab poetry and culture, because I felt like we are living in this region, in the Middle East, and we are not alone: There are nations here whose culture is Arab. – Yitzhak Navon
This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry – which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just dropping into the work and really pouring out my soul. – Sonja Sohn
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all. – Wallace Stevens
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. – Walter Pater
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. – William Butler Yeats
In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems. – Tony Buzan
For me, poetry was… the fastest way to express what I was feeling, what I was going through. – Shane Koyczan
Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human. – Yusef Komunyakaa
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry. – Salvatore Quasimodo
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. – Simon Armitage
I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier. – Vikram Seth
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published. – Sally Kirkland
When you’re looking that far out, you’re giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn’t need translation. It’s like poetry, it touches you. – Story Musgrave
Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There’s huge, visionary poetry in it. – Simon Callow
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals. – Sylvia Plath
