The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding.
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what's in style, what's current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
The length and shape of the poemetto, like the greater Romantic lyric of English poetry, lends itself to retrospection and commentary.
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
Why should poetry have to make sense?
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
I think the term poet is a very exalted term and should be applied to a man at the end of his work. When he looks back over the body of his work and he's written poetry then let the verdict be that he's a poet.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.
I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.
