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" That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people. "

Derek Walcott

Beautiful

People

Poetry

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" Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. "

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Mind

Enjoy

Person

" I did not move into developing or processing color. I stayed with black and white. I still think to this day that I prefer to work in black and white if it has to do with poetry or anything other than specific reality. I have worked in color when I thought it was the appropriate way to express the thought that I was working on. "

" I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation. "

Derek Walcott

Writing

Prayer

" Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness. "

" 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. "

" That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means. "

" When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else. "

" Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading. "

" Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty. "

" In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't. "

Derek Walcott

You

Opinion

" The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. "

" Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born. "

" And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem. "

" I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet. "

" The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. "

" I think, at the heart of the idea of American democracy, there is something tender. "

" For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art. "

" 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. "

Rupi Kaur

Honey

Know

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

" I would give anything to sing like Beyonce or Adele. I've said many times to my friends that if I could sing like them, I would give up poetry and writing. "

Rupi Kaur

Writing

" Dancing is the poetry of the foot. "

" Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. "

" A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. "

" I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.' "

" Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god. "

Derek Walcott

Remembering

Memory

" Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes... whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber... they're listening to poetry. "

" A grain of poetry suffices to season a century. "