Poetry Purpose Quotes

All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said "Wanted: National Poet." And he was innocent enough to believe there really was such a job. And if he could just write a poem that incorporated everything he felt and suspected and hoped for from America that he would have the position.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

I should think that many of our poets, the honest ones, will confess to having no manifesto. It is a painful confession but the art of poetry carries its own powers without having to break them down into critical listings. I do not mean that poetry should be raffish and irresponsible clown tossing off words into the void. But the very feeling of a good poem carries its own reason for being... Art is its own excuse, and it’s either Art or it’s something else. It’s either a poem or a piece of cheese.

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

All a poet can do today is warn.

Poetry is not about personal pain or tragedy. It should resonate the society's grief.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my poems as meant to be overheard, as I think all of these poems are. It seems to me if you get experience right, even your most painful or humiliating experiences - if you get those experiences right for yourself and make discoveries as you go along and find for them some formal glue - they will be poems for others.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

It is a part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

What is poetry which does not save nations or people?

I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.