The power of poetry
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I believed I wanted to be a poet
but deep down
I just wanted to be a poem
—Jaime Gil de Biedma
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Poetry is an echo
asking a shadow
to dance
—Carl Sandburg
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Everything you invent is true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
—Julian Barnes
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
—Wallace Stevens
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Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
—Plutarch
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Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
—Plato
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Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
—Mary Oliver
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Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.
—Alice Walker
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Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
—Sylvia Plath
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Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
—Robert Frost
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It is a test that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
—T. S. Eliot
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The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
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The aim of art is almost divine—to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
—Victor Hugo
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Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history, for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
—Aristotle
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It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
—Stephane Mallarme
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Don’t write love poems when you’re in love. Write them when you’re not in love.
—Richard Hugo
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Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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It was at that age that poetry came in search of me.
—Pablo Neruda
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If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
—Emily Dickinson
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Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
—June Jordan
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Always be a poet, even in prose.
—Charles Baudelaire
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If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
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It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there
—William Carlos Williams
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Without poetry,
we lose our way.
—Joy Harjo
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Poems
Please Call Me By My True Names (listen)
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
[i thank you god for most this amazing]
44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s
Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane
The Chairs That No One Sits In
Building with Its Face Blown Off
Another Postponement of Destruction
While we were fearing it, it came
In the Museum of Your Last Day
Hope is the thing with feathers
Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening
Dividend of the Social Opt Out
[anyone lived in a pretty how town]
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
Autobiography in five short chapters
In the space where there is nothing
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··· Whole lotta poems & poets ···
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Poetry in America · featured guests · free open courses
How poetry came to matter again
The life-changing words of Mary Oliver
Milk & honey · The sun & her flowers
Poems about loneliness & solitude