All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.
Norman MacCaig

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
Norman MacCaig

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
Norman MacCaig

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
Norman MacCaig

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
Norman MacCaig

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
Norman MacCaig

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Henry Ellis

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Walter Scott

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
Marilyn Hacker

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
Marilyn Hacker

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Peter Abrahams

When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.
Patti Smith

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
Jean de la Bruyere

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
Matthew Arnold

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold

Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Comte de Lautreamont