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

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

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

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
Boris Pasternak

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

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

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

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.
Anna Quindlen

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
Russell Baker

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
Russell Baker

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
Russell Baker

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
Jim Jarmusch

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
Jim Jarmusch

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Thomas B. Macaulay

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
Thomas B. Macaulay