Difficult Quote by Joseph Brodsky

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

The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energised field of association and connotation, of…

— George Steiner

Poetry is the enemy of the poem.

— Stanley Kunitz

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all…

— Robert Hass

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal -…

— May Sarton

Poetry is often generations in advance of the thought of its time.

— Louise Bogan

Poetry is a life-cherishing force.

— Mary Oliver

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

— Octavio Paz

People in power tend to find poetry dangerous to them because it is dislocating, they can't catch it, can't control it. They prefer coherence,…

— Elia Suleiman

“In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called…

— Bashō Matsuo

“A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides…

— Terry Eagleton