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" For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect. "

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" If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything. "

Alice Oswald

People

Poetry

Light

" Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. "

" We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist. "

" There's poetry in being the band that can sell out Wembley but also makes a record in a garage. I don't like doing what people expect me to do. "

" A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud. "

Tony Harrison

Poetry

Writing

" In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated. "

" Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. "

" I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it. "

" Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour. "

" Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry. "

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Art

Logic

Music

" Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words. "

" The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. "

" I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality. "

" My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel. "

" Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty. "

" On the subject of literary genres, I've always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I'd love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story. "

" I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. "

" I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality. "

" I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing. "

" In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original. "

Fanny Howe

Early

Poetry

" I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel. "

" Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry. "

" As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary. "

" Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody. "

" As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me. "

Donald Hall

Seventies

Ahead

" As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. "

" The poet doesn't invent. He listens. "

" I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do. "

" Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV. "

" I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time. "