Able Quote by Annie Dillard

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

— Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.

— Camille Paglia

Poetry makes sense of the parts of human experience that are confusing and not decodable in any other way. It makes accessible the inaccessible.

— Tavares Strachan

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

— Andrei Tarkovsky

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in…

— Diane Ackerman

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us…

— Naomi Shihab Nye

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is…

— Edward Hirsch

By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry…

— David Whyte

Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to…

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than…

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that…

— Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual…

— Jonathan Lethem