John Dryden Quotes

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

The interesting thing is that you don't often meet a poet who doesn't have a sense of humour, and some of them do keep it out of their poems because they're afraid of being seen as light versifiers.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.

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.

I am not sure that I can make the epigrams that you are hunting for. The truth is you have a pretty old horse to run and you’ve got to take me as I am.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

When I'm writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Unlike my subject will I frame my song, It shall be witty and it shan't be long.

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

Here I sit, beneath the large window of a first-floor Georgian flat, exploring the corridors of my sordid imagination for comedic words of beauty.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.