Civilization Quote by Diane Wakoski

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

— Ezra Pound

Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They…

— Stanley Kunitz

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of…

— Adrienne Rich

Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion.

— William Wordsworth

Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

— Mark Doty

Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

— Orson F. Whitney

“Poetry is the language of the gods. I love poems myself. But poetry is not only in poems; it is diffused everywhere, it is…

— Ivan Turgenev

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of…

— Paul Valery

Poetry is a very complex art… It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

— Ezra Pound

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

— Camille Paglia

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient…

— Robert Morgan

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity for our existence. It forms the quality of light from which we predicate our…

— Audre Lorde