The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Seamus Heaney

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
Lascelles Abercrombie

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.
Lascelles Abercrombie

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.
Lascelles Abercrombie

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Seamus Heaney

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
Lascelles Abercrombie

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.
Lascelles Abercrombie

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
Lascelles Abercrombie

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
Lascelles Abercrombie

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
Naguib Mahfouz

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
Muriel Rukeyser

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
Muriel Rukeyser

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Adrienne Rich

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Joyce Carol Oates