Clandestine Quote by Claudio Magris

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue…

— June Jordan

The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the…

— Mary Ruefle

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but…

— John Keats

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to…

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

“Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies”

— Oscar Sparrow

To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or…

— Galway Kinnell

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's…

— Diane Wakoski

“Poetry was a secret vice, and properly so.”

— John Steinbeck

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

— Jorie Graham

Poetry is when words are robbed of their attributed truth.

— Gunter Brus

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do…

— Adrienne Rich

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

— Wallace Stevens