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Poetry Quotes by Billy Collins
- When you get a poem [in a public place], it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector…
- It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
- Poetry is my cheap means of transportation, by the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started.…
- Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction.
- Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to…
- Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of…
- The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she…
- There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is…
- ...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source.
- Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear…
- ...the trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry...
- High School is the place where poetry goes to die.
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden