Quotes of: Edgar Keyword

Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight.

Nancy Lublin

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

Natasha Trethewey

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

Natasha Trethewey

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Philip Levine

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Paul Muldoon

Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

Robert Adamson

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.

Robert Littell

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

Robert Morgan

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

Robert Morgan

The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.

Reynolds Price

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Robert Penn Warren

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Seamus Heaney

The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.

Victor Hugo

Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.

William Ernest Henley

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

W. S. Merwin

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

Wislawa Szymborska

Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.

Alain de Botton

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

Ambrose Bierce

Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.

Al Goldstein

Nothing can be more contrary to religion and the clergy than reason and common sense.

Baron d'Holbach

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

Blaise Pascal