Poetry Quotes

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Dennis Potter

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.

Danielle Steel

There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

David Whyte

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

David Whyte

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Diane Wakoski

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

Diane Wakoski

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Diane Wakoski

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

Diane Wakoski

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Diane Wakoski

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.

Diane Wakoski

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

Diane Wakoski

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.

Diane Wakoski

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

Dylan Walsh

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

Ellen Bass

For a poet to depict a poet in poetry is a hazardous experiment; in regarding one's own trade a sense of humour and a little wholesome cynicism are not amiss.

Edward Dowden

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickinson

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Emily Dickinson

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

Elizabeth Edwards

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

E. M. Forster

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

E. M. Forster