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 on poetry
This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry? Azar Nafisi on poetry
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases. William Shenstone on poetry
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 on poetry
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left. Robert Staughton Lynd on poetry
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 on poetry
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 on poetry
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. Walter Pater on poetry
Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Walter Pater on poetry
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 on poetry
All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed. Norman MacCaig on poetry
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it. Norman MacCaig on poetry
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so. Norman MacCaig on poetry
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 on poetry
I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry. Norman MacCaig on poetry
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now. Norman MacCaig on poetry
In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry. Norman MacCaig on poetry
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous. Norman MacCaig on poetry
I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream. Emilio Estevez on poetry
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry. Stephen Colbert on poetry