Poetry Quote by Osip Mandelstam

Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.

— Anonymous

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy,…

— Joseph Brodsky

“I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost…

— Osip Mandelstam

In a lethal world, poetry is necessary for survival.

— Mary Caroline Richards

The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.

— Ryszard Kapuscinski

“In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their fair share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their…

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world. After”

— Colson Whitehead

“Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.”

— Harold Bloom

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

— John Dos Passos

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

— Joseph Brodsky

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style." —Vladimir Nabokov”

— Leslie Langtry

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something…

— Mary Oliver