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Famous Poets Quotations - Top 30 Poetry Quotations by Famous Poets

Famous Poets Quotations - Top 30 Poetry Quotations by Famous Poets

"For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history."
-- Aristotle

"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."
-- W. H. Auden

"Eloquence is the poetry of prose."
-- William C. Bryant

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

"How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery."
-- Elizabeth Drew

"She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you."
-- Bob Dylan

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences."
-- T S Eliot

"Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Only poetry inspires poetry."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."
-- Robert Frost

"The man is either mad, or he is making verses."
-- Horace

"Good religious poetry . . . is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout."
-- A. E. Housman

"I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer."
-- Langston Hughes

"I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged . . . I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out."
-- Erica Jong

"As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry."
-- June Jordan

"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality."
-- James Joyce

"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity --it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."
-- John Keats

"Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words."
-- Archibald MacLeish

"I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it."
-- Marianne Moore

"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants."
-- Howard Nemerov

"And he whose fustian's so sublimely bad/ It is not poetry, but prose run mad."
-- Alexander Pope

"I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself."
-- Carl Sandburg

"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do."
-- Stephen Spender

"I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this."
-- George Steiner

"Everything is complicated; if that we not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore."
-- Wallace Stevens

"Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech."
-- Henry David Thoreau

"How do poems grow? They grow out of your life."
-- Robert Penn Warren

"All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."
-- William Wordsworth

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote."
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

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In The News:

Los Angeles Times
Wislawa Szymborska, a Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, dies at 88
Washington Post
Wislawa Szymborska, a Nobel Prize-winning poet who used the imagery of everyday objects and a mordant style to explore dramatic themes of human experience including love, war and death, died Feb. 1 at her home in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.
Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-Winning Polish Poet, Dies at 88New York Times
The World Remembers Wislawa SzymborskaHuffington Post (blog)
Wislawa Szymborska dies at 88; Nobel-winning Polish poetLos Angeles Times
Philadelphia Inquirer -Hindustan Times -Wall Street Journal
all 274 news articles »

Flush Poets Society: Donnelly's 'Cloud Corporation' Wins Six-Figure Prize
NPR
by David Orr "Poetry" and "money" are rarely found in the same sentence, unless a practitioner of the former is lamenting his dearth of the latter. Most poets get by on odd jobs, occasional grants, adjunct teaching, snippets of journalism or â€” in the ...
Timothy Donnelly of Brooklyn wins Kingsley Tufts Poetry AwardNew York Daily News (blog)
Brooklyn man wins Kingsley Tufts Poetry AwardWall Street Journal
Claremont Graduate University Announces Winners of 2012 Tufts Poetry AwardsPR Newswire (press release)

all 142 news articles »

Wigan Today
Poetry night reads well
Wigan Today
WHILE it seems a quiet one this week for music, sample some poetry from local writers instead. Write Out Loud (WOL) will take place next Thursday at the Tudor House Hotel. The open mic nights, which are run by local poet John Togher, give Wigan writers ...

La. poet laureate to be in Leesville
Alexandria Town Talk
Louisiana Poet Laureate Julie Kane will make two stops in Leesville on Feb. 13 to offer presentations on humor in poetry and sign copies of her poetry volumes. Kane, a professor of English at Northwestern State University, makes public appearances and ...

Telegraph.co.uk
Scotland referendum: We need a poetry of the Union to defeat Salmond's freedom ...
Telegraph.co.uk
Not that Labour's role in the campaign won't be vital â€“ I'll come back to this, because it's related to those shocking deprivation figures in Glasgow â€“ but Tories are the natural romantics of the Union, and should develop and articulate a poetry about ...

and more »

Poetry adding cheer to go with your beer
This is Kent
FOLLOWING last week's performances by Olympic poet Lemn Sissay in Thanet alongside Burns Night, Brown Ale takes a look at wordsmiths providing punters with purple prose to punctuate their pints. Spoken word has taken off in recent years with lyricists ...

and more »

SGGP
HCMC to host 10th Vietnam Poetry Day
SGGP
The 10th Vietnam Poetry Day will be held at the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Ho Chi Minh City on February 5, organised by the Ho Chi Minh City Writers' Association and Sai Gon Giai Phong Newspaper. Members from poetry clubs from various Districts, ...

and more »

Louder Than a Bomb Tulsa: Local teens' slam poetry resonates
Tulsa World
Heavy subjects for teenagers, who some think are too preoccupied with texting, video games, social networks and being cool to write such personal poetry, let alone perform their works in front of each other. Kent Martin, director and co-founder of ...

DNAinfo
Nepali Poets Share Love of Homeland at Jackson Heights Festival
DNAinfo
Noted Nepali poet Govinda Giri Prerana will read his works at the Nepali poem festival on Sun., Feb. 5, in Jackson Heights. (Govinda Giri Prerana) JACKSON HEIGHTS â€” When Anjali Roka came to the United States in 2003, she tried to fit in with ...

Victorino Kanda presents poetry book
AngolaPress
In presenting the book, Lopito FeijÃ³ said that this literary work is a poetic narrative that focuses on the pre-colonial and colonial epoch, in which the colonial political police of Portugal used to repress in a very brutal way the Angolan patriots ...

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