Reading Poetry Quotes

• Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

  Rita Dove

  Powerful, Language, Poetry Reading

  13 Copy quote

• Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

  Khalil Gibran

  Pain, Joy, Wonder

  Khalil Gibran “The New Frontier and Sand and Foam”, Library of Alexandria

  85 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

  James Tate

  Editing, Needs, Poetry Reading

  James Tate (1999). “The route as briefed”, Univ of Michigan Pr

  50 Copy quote

  Show source

• If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

  Emily Dickinson

  Book, Fire, Body

  Quoted in Martha Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924)

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

  Edward Hirsch

  Reading, Adventure, Creative

  Edward Hirsch (1999). “How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  48 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

  Paul Engle

  Ideas, Skins, Together

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

  48 Copy quote

  Show source

• We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

  John Fowles

  Writing, Poetry, Poet

  1969 The French Lieutenant's Woman, ch.19.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even though poetry was written for the 'minds ear' as well as the physical ear, the minds ear can be trained only by the other ... which comes back to reading poetry aloud.

  Yvor Winters

  Reading, Mind, Ears

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

  Paul Engle

  Language And Power, Ordinary, Tough Skin

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Writing, Immature

  The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

  Don Marquis

  Education, Learning, Knowledge

  Don Marquis, William McCollum (1982). “Selected letters of Don Marquis”, Northwoods Pr

  25 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Love, Valentines Day, Cute Boyfriend

  1850 Poems,'Sonnets from the Portuguese', sonnet 43.

  166 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

  John Keats

  Inspirational, Remembrance, Literature

  Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 238

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

  Oscar Wilde

  Spring, Book, Reading

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “The Prose of Oscar Wilde”, p.186, Cosimo, Inc.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  William Shakespeare

  Love, Mind, Wedding Ceremony

  Sonnet 116

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

  e. e. cummings

  Love, Relationship, Valentines Day

  E. E. Cummings (2013). “Like a perhaps hand: Poems. Gedichte”, p.45, C.H.Beck

  13 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Motivational, Happiness

  "The Road Not Taken" l. 16 (1916)

  192 Copy quote

  Show source

• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Marriage, Sweet Love, Educational

  Sonnets from the Portuguese no. 43 (1850)

  115 Copy quote

  Show source

• Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

  Virginia Woolf

  Reading, Air, Doors

  Virginia Woolf (2017). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929 - 1932”, p.298, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

  J. Courtney Sullivan

  Yoga, Reading, Giving

  6 Copy quote

• The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Jobs, Sex, Reading

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.248, Atlantic Books Ltd

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  Reading, Recovery, Kissing

  Laurie Halse Anderson (2009). “Wintergirls”, p.207, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'

  Jill Scott

  Reading, Years, Sometimes

  7 Copy quote

• If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

  Mark Strand

  Reading, Government, World

  Inscape Journal Interview, inscape.byu.edu.

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

  Gary Shteyngart

  Love, Lying, Reading

  Gary Shteyngart (2010). “Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel”, p.339, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source