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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Poetry makes nothing happen.
—W. H. Auden
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Without poetry,
we lose our way.
—Joy Harjo
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Poems
Poem: Please Call Me By My True Names (listen)
Poem: You Wake the Dead to Life
Poem: Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Poem: This Poem Should Be a Circle
Poem: The World Is Too Much With Us
Poem: At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border
Poem: [i thank you God for most this amazing]
Poem: 44th Birthday Evening, at Harris’s
Poem: won’t you celebrate with me
Poem: Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane
Poem: The Chairs That No One Sits In
Poem: I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
Poem: Not so far as the forest
Poem: Wild nights - Wild nights!
Poem: Building with Its Face Blown Off
Poem: Another Postponement of Destruction
Poem: While we were fearing it, it came
Poem: In the Museum of Your Last Day
Poem: Hope is the thing with feathers
Poem: Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening
Poem: Dividend of the Social Opt Out
Poem: [anyone lived in a pretty how town]
Poem: [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
Poem: The Last Things I’ll Remember
Poem: Autobiography in five short chapters
Poem: In the space where there is nothing
Poem: you can take it with you
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··· Whole lotta poems & poets ···
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The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)
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
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World