At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It’s a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty. – Tobias Hill
It’s always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It’s hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope. – Tom Hanks
I have just discovered the beautiful poetry of Soren Ulrik Thomsen. Danish is not the strongest of languages, but he uses it very well. – Sidse Babett Knudsen
The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of ‘Le Language des Fleurs,’ written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book – which was a list of flowers and their meanings – de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine. – Vanessa Diffenbaugh
If you were going to choose a way of making your way in this world and a place to start from, you might not choose poetry and you might not choose Huddersfield. – Simon Armitage
All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming. – Sophie Hannah
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. – Theodore Sturgeon
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by – the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to. – Tracy K. Smith
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of – I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry. – Shelby Foote
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom. – Wallace Stevens
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. – Satyajit Ray
Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating. – Viggo Mortensen
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
I think of myself as an ambassador of the arts. In my heart of hearts, I know the world would be a more peaceful, tender place if we were more moved by the poetry around us. – Tim Seibles
Somehow, the words don’t have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That’s how I start. Once I’m off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop – not that what I do is poetry. – Simon Schama
Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn’t just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person. – Sarah Kay
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. – Vincent Van Gogh
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing. – W. S. Merwin
I’ve been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, ‘I want to be a rapper.’ But I’m a white girl, not going to be a rapper. – Sasha Grey
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. – William Hazlitt
Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do. – Vikram Seth
I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics. – Yehuda Amichai
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