Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
I’m not an academic, but I’ve always loved poetry since I’ve been small.
I saw the Village as a place you could escape to, to express yourself. When I first went there, I wrote and performed poetry. Then I drew portraits for a couple of years. It took a while before I thought about picking up a guitar.
On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn’t seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.
I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.
I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It’s not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.
When Auden said his poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chamber, he’d said it all.
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there’s no visual distraction.
We all need ways to express ourselves, and poetry is one of mine.
In bohemian circles, we were very aware that poetry was missing from popular culture.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
I’d say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren’t always accustomed to going.
Poetry can’t cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.
Poetry is life distilled.
For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I’m not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore.
When you write poetry you are always addressing the world somehow.
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
