M. Ward Quotes

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

I love taking on other people's words. They are much more interesting to me than my own.

Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

Art and life go together. I have to have a life filled with experiences to make art, and I have to have art around me to live well.

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it

Not to admire, is all the art I know To make men happy, or to keep them so. Thus Horace wrote we all know long ago; And thus Pope quotes the precept to re-teach From his translation; but had none admired, Would Pope have sung, or Horace been inspired?

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men.

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

The finest poetry was first experience.

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

I view art as an inspirational tool.