One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime. – Robert Morgan
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. – Robert Morgan
The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry. – Robert Morgan
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think. – Robert Morgan
Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know. – Joseph Roux
I write all the time – I write poetry, I love to write. – Colin Quinn
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir. – George Farquhar
I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it. – Carol Ann Duffy
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. – Mario Cuomo
In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry. – Andrew Motion
I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry. – Andrew Motion
More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race. – Andrew Motion
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet. – Huston Smith
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases. – William Shenstone
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical. – William Shenstone
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left. – Robert Staughton Lynd
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry. – Walter Pater
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. – Walter Pater
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan. – Jacques Derrida
However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird. – Norman MacCaig
