What is poetry? you ask, while fixing your blue pupil on…

What poetry is asking us to accept can be difficult. Our proximity to our mortality, the fragility of our existence, how close we live…

— Matthew Zapruder

it is as unseeing to ask what is the use of poetry as it would be to ask what is the use of religion.

— Edith Sitwell

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts…

— John Drinkwater

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an…

— Billy Collins

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

— Dejan Stojanovic

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

— Helen Vendler

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

— Washington Irving

“In the streets, the children scream, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed,” he crooned, putting down the metal grill tongs to take my…

— Alexandria Clarke

The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from…

— Richard Dawkins

“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the…

— Erica Jong

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

— David Hare

“Time gives poetry to a battlefield...”

— Graham Greene

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

— Samuel R. Delany

The name Phenomenal Woman was inspired by Maya Angelo, who wrote 'Phenomenal Woman', a favorite poem of mine.

— Meena Harris

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

— Carl Rakosi