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" One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music. "

Stephen Sondheim

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" 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. "

" Every single soul is a poem. "

" Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration. "

Stephen Sondheim

" Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew. "

" I started playing guitar when I was 13. I'd written a few songs on the guitar over some time. I'd written a book of poetry, and I got a book of lyrics that I had when I was a kid. "

" I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do. "

" For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means. "

" 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. "

" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "

" Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it. "

" Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold. "

" The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. "

" I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself. "

" There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. "

" The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry. "

Muriel Rukeyser

" Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. "

" Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. "

" That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish. "

H. P. Lovecraft

" I've written poetry most of my life. "

" When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous. "

" The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan. "

" One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there. "

Stephen Sondheim

" The moment of change is the only poem. "

" Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. "

Percy Bysshe Shelley

" Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives. "

Paramahansa Yogananda

" Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. "

" 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. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Poetry always, always, always is a key piece of democracy. "

" If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. "

Muriel Rukeyser

" The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair. "