Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive…

“Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.”

— Helen Keller

'And I will give you a new heart, And I will put a new spirit in you I will take out your stubborn stony…

— Andrew Guzaldo

La poe sie veutquelque chose d'e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.

— Denis Diderot

But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze.…

— E. M. Forster

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.

— Adrian Mitchell

“For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of…

— Philip Sidney

I've never thought of my poems as violent. Violence, to me, has so much negativity attached to it - maybe that's my trouble with…

— Alex Lemon

I don't think poetry needs to be "easily understandable." First of all, there are often complexities of syntax, form, unfamiliar absences, etc., that require…

— Matthew Zapruder

People who publish poetry today do it from a sense that poetry needs to be published, not because they think they are going to…

— Campbell McGrath

I do think poetry needs to invite the reader, especially when there are so many other distractions while reading.

— David Starkey

Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

— Alex Lemon

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when…

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those…

— Aristotle

The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.

— Robert Penn Warren

“Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these…

— Don DeLillo