Reading Poetry Quotes:

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

- John Fowles

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

topic: Writing, Reading Poetry, Poetry

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

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

topic: Inspirational, Reading Poetry, Remembrance, Singularity, Wording

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

- William Shakespeare

source: Sonnet 116

topic: Love, Reading Poetry, Mind, Love Poems, Wedding Poetry

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

- Rita Dove

topic: Powerful, Poetry, Language, Distillation, Poetry Reading

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

- Khalil Gibran

topic: Pain, Joy, Poetry, Joy And Pain, Poetry Reading

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

- James Tate

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

topic: Editing, Poetry, Needs, Poetry Reading, Reading Poetry

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

- Emily Dickinson

topic: Book, Taken, Fire, Emily, Reading Poetry

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

- Edward Hirsch

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

topic: Reading, Adventure, Creative, Reading Poetry

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

source: New York Times, February 17, 1957.

topic: Ideas, Poetry, Skins, Tough Skin, Power Of Language

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

topic: Reading, Mind, Ears, Reading Poetry

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

- T. S. Eliot

topic: Immature, Different, Stealing, Mature And Immature, Writing Poetry

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

- Don Marquis

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

topic: Education, Learning, Knowledge, Poetry By Poets, Poetry Reading

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

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

topic: Love, Valentines Day, Soul, Marriage Ceremony, Souls In Love

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

- Oscar Wilde

topic: Spring, Book, Reading, Poetry Reading, Reading Poetry

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

- e. e. cummings

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

topic: Love, Relationship, Valentines Day, Long Relationship, Love Poems

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

- Robert Frost

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

topic: Inspirational, Happiness, Success, Different Roads, Journey And Destination

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

topic: Love, Sight, Grace, Marriage Ceremony, Writing Poems

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

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

topic: Reading, Air, Doors, Horde, Reading Poetry

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

topic: Yoga, Reading, Giving, Love For Humanity, Reading Poetry

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

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

topic: Jobs, Sex, Reading, Reading Poetry, Tiny Things

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

topic: Reading, Recovery, Kissing, Eating Ice Cream, Reading Poetry

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

topic: Reading, Years, Sometimes, Reading Poetry

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

source: Inscape Journal Interview, inscape.byu.edu.

topic: Reading, Government, World, Head Of State, Reading Poetry

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

topic: Love, Lying, Reading, People Lie, Reading Poetry

I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.

- Cate Marvin

source: Source: www.redividerjournal.org

topic: Believe, Reading, Writing, Dead Poets, Poetry Reading

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

- Nicholson Baker

topic: Reading, Writing, Firsts, Reading Poetry

The library was open for one hour after school let out. I hid there, looking at art books and reading poetry.

- Lynda Barry

topic: Art, Reading, Book, After School, Reading Poetry

I was reading poetry to my girlfriends, and they were like, you're really good. You should go to some poetry readings or something. And I eventually went and got a, you know, somewhat of a name for myself and a little bit of a following.

- Jill Scott

source: "Jill Scott: Act The Part". "All Things Considered" with Laura Sullivan, www.npr.org. June 18, 2011.

topic: Girlfriend, Reading, Names, Poetry Reading, Reading Poetry

It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

- John Taylor Gatto

source: "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

topic: Reading, Learning, Want, Unschooling, Reading Poetry

Reading poetry and watching cricket were the sum of my world, and the two are not so far apart as many aesthetes might believe.

- Donald Bradman

topic: Believe, Reading, Two, Reading Poetry

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.

- Christian Wiman

topic: Reading, People, Quality, Reading Poetry

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

- Phyllis McGinley

topic: Reading, Poetry, Pastime, Reading Poetry

Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.

- Betty Friedan

source: Source: www.pbs.org

topic: Reading, Sorority, Want, Reading Poetry

I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions of poetry have been getting far off from normal life, so that to have a prose bridge makes reading poetry seem more natural.

- William Empson

source: William Empson (2000). “The complete poems”, Lane, Allen

topic: Reading, Thinking, Bridges, Reading Poetry

I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.

- Denise Duhamel

source: Interview with Karla Huston, www.smartishpace.com. 2004.

topic: Believe, Reading, Writing, Good Poetry, Reading Poetry

Do not ever read books about versification: no poet ever learnt it that way. If you are going to be a poet, it will come to you naturally and you will pick up all you need from reading poetry.

- A. E. Housman

topic: Book, Reading, Needs, Reading Poetry

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

- Colin Wilson

source: "The Origins of the Sexual Impulse" by Colin Wilson, (p. 75), 1963.

topic: Reading, Listening, Needs, Reading Poetry

I think vampires have gotten maybe a little bit silly in the last years where they're all wearing crushed velvet and reading poetry and making sweet love to their victims, you know, it's not really all that scary.

- Josh Hartnett

source: "Interview: Josh Hartnett Talks 30 Days of Night". Interview with Joe Utichi, editorial.rottentomatoes.com. November 1, 2007.

topic: Sweet, Silly, Reading, Reading Poetry

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

- Anne Lamott

source: Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. April 6, 2010.

topic: Reading, Mind, Great Work, Reading Poetry

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

- Edward Hirsch

source: "How to Read a Poem". Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

topic: Reading, Secret, Reader, Reading Poetry

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

- Phyllis McGinley

topic: Reading, Australia Day, Pastime, Reading Poetry

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

- Jesmyn Ward

topic: Reading, Trying, Fiction, Reading Poetry