Quotes About Expression

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

A poet is a painter of the soul.

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

Poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry.

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

I was told over and over the poetry in forms was "conservative" but there was no analysis of why this was so.

I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author. "Wine is bottled poetry

I think poetry can lead to policy, and I can hear the laughter when I say that.

I think most good poetry is about suffering; I think that's what underlies the love in these landays pieces - suffering and longing.

The poetry of life must not be replaced with matter-of-fact prose.

Poetry is very similar to music, only less notes and more words.

Don't you think that as a people, Americans have less poetry, real poetry, in their souls than any other nations?

I wrote a lot of poetry in the last two years of high school, all about the same girl I was in love with. That was pretty awful. Did you know that in poetry, every line does not need to rhyme?

[I've] learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body.

What's the function of poetry? It's to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: 'Wow, I've experienced that, but you've expressed it so much better.'

I've always felt that a really good joke, a really good one-liner, is a really good line of poetry. It's imagistic, it's compact, there is a rhythm to it.

Poems are my link with the times, with the new life of my people.

Much contemporary verse reads like failed short-short stories rather than failed poetry.

Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.

I sing, I clean house, I write poetry. I cry. And I tell everyone I can, "I Believe in YOU."