Poetry Perception Quotes

I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.

Poetry has always been made to seem kind of cultish. But the truth is, everybody really loves it! It's much more mainstream than anyone thought.

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things.

The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

If, at a party, I say I'm a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I'd said I'm a priest.

As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied.

So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.

It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.