Quotes of: Roberts Keyword

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

E. M. Forster

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

Franz Wright

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Gustave Flaubert

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.

Grace Paley

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Jeffery Deaver

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Gaston Bachelard

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

John Masefield

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

Mark Strand

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

Margaret Walker

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

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

The Orthodox believe in Jewish literacy, and most of the rest of us couldn't care less. Rabbis and other creatures have a monopoly on Judaism. This is a turnoff in a world that is increasingly secular and that has turned away from religion. Jews are ...

Michael Steinhardt

The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.

Andy Goldsworthy