Poetry Importance Quotes

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

Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.

It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.

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

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

Poetry [is] more necessary than ever as a fire to light our tongues.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.

Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.

Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.