Poetry Quotes
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Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. (Quote by - William Blissett)
He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. (Quote by - Edward Bulwer-Lytton)
If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow. (Quote by - The Quote Garden)
The finest poetry was first experience. (Quote by - Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. (Quote by - Thomas Gray)
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out.... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. (Quote by - A.E. Housman)
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment. (Quote by - Carl Sandburg)
Who can tell the dancer from the dance? (Quote by - William Butler Yeats)
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. (Quote by - Don Marquis)
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. (Quote by - Carl Sandburg)
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. (Quote by - Salvatore Quasimodo)
Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here. (Quote by - Phyllis McGinley)
Poets arent very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful.. (Quote by - Ogden Nash)
God is the perfect poet. (Quote by - Robert Browning)
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind. (Quote by - Maxwell Bodenheim)
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all. (Quote by - Wallace Stevens)
Always be a poet, even in prose. (Quote by - Charles Baudelaire)
Why then we should drop into poetry. (Quote by - Charles Dickens)
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. (Quote by - Oscar Wilde)
The job of the poet is to render the world--to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do. (Quote by - Mark Van Doren)
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. (Quote by - Eli Khamarov)
Poetry is not a profession, it's a destiny. (Quote by - Mikhail Dudan)
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. (Quote by - W.H. Auden)
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. (Quote by - Stephen Mallarme)
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. (Quote by - Marianne Moore)
The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. (Quote by - T. S. Eliot)
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. (Quote by - Dylan Thomas)
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? (Quote by - W.H. Auden)
What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the pearly shell That murmurs of the far-off, murmuring sea; A precious jewel carved most curiously; It is a little picture painted well. What is a Sonnet? 'Tis the tear that fell From a great poet's hidden ecstasy; A two-edged sword, a star, a song--ah me! Sometimes a heavy tolling funeral bell. (Quote by - Richard Watson Gilder)
Doeg, though without knowing how or why, Made a still a blundering kind of melody; Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in; Free from all meaning whether good or bad, And in one word, heroically mad. (Quote by - John Dryden)
Poetry is a mug's game. (Quote by - T. S. Eliot)
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. (Quote by - E.M. Forster)
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. (Quote by - Jean Cocteau)
Poetry is nothing but healthy speech. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)
Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme. (Quote by - John Fletcher)
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. (Quote by - Rene Char)
Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week. (Quote by - Augustus William)
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. (Quote by - G.K. Chesterton)
Poetry is itself a thing of God; He made his prophets poets;and the more We feel of poesie do we become Like God in love and power,--under-makers. (Quote by - Philip James Bailey)
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. (Quote by - George Sand)
The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more? (Quote by - Augustus William)
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. (Quote by - charles Simic)
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. (Quote by - Voltaire)
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. (Quote by - Richard Rosen)
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you. (Quote by - Joseph Joubert)
The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. (Quote by - Salman Rushdie)
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do. (Quote by - Cyril Connolly)
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right. (Quote by - Rudyard Kipling)
You speak As one who fed on poetry. (Quote by - Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Baron Lytton)
Your prayer can be poetry, and poetry can be your prayer. (Quote by - Noelani Day)
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. (Quote by - Dennis Gabor)
The true poem is the poet's mind. (Quote by - Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. (Quote by - Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. (Quote by - Plato)
Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty. (Quote by - Robert Gilfillan)
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. (Quote by - Gustave Flaubert)
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. (Quote by - Thomas Babington Macaulay)
Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. (Quote by - Augustus William)
Prose--words in their best order;--poetry--the best words in their best order. (Quote by - Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Poetry is what gets lost in translation. (Quote by - John Fletcher)
'Twas he that ranged the words at random flung, Pierced the fair pearls and them together strung. (Quote by - Bidpai)
When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again. (Quote by - T. S. Eliot)
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. (Quote by - Carl Sandburg)
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. (Quote by - Edgar Allan Poe)
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth--the true poet is very near the oracle. (Quote by - Edwin Hubbel Chapin)
A poet can survive everything but a misprint. (Quote by - Oscar Wilde)
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. (Quote by - Sainte-Beuve)
Poetry should should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. (Quote by - John Keats)
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. (Quote by - E. B. White)
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. (Quote by - Leonard Cohen)
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. (Quote by - Charles Baudelaire)
Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
One of Wordsworth's Lake District neighbours remarked, upon hearing of the poet's death "I suppose his son will carry on the business." (Quote by - Anonymous)
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. (Quote by - William Hazlitt)
Of trees I (Krishna) am the fig. (Quote by - Bhagavad Gita)
You can't write poetry on the computer. (Quote by - Quentin Tarantino)
Colour, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science. (Quote by - Henry David Thoreau)
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did. (Quote by - Christopher Morley)
When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. (Quote by - T. S. Eliot)
The poet doesn't invent. He listens. (Quote by - Jean Cocteau)
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too. (Quote by - Walt Whitman)
A drainless shower of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme of power; 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm. (Quote by - John Keats)
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. (Quote by - Marianne Moore)
The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. (Quote by - W. Somerset Maugham)
Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich. (Quote by - William Bolitho)
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. (Quote by - Allen Tate)
There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop. (Quote by - Augustus William)
It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself. (Quote by - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
A sold poem loses half its meaning. (Quote by - Glade Byron Addams)
Some force whole regions, in despite O' geography, to change their site; Make former times shake hands with latter, And that which was before come after; But those that write in rhyme still make The one verse for the other's sake; For one for sense, and one for rhyme, I think's sufficient at one time. (Quote by - Samuel Butler)
Poets are like magicians, searching for magical phrases to pull rabbits out of people's souls. (Quote by - Glade Byron Addams)
For florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime. (Quote by - George Gordon Noel Byron)
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. (Quote by - Edmund Burke)
When the brain gets as dry as an empty nut, When the reason stands on its squarest toes, When the mind (like a beard) has a formal cut,-- There is a place and enough for the pains of prose; But whenever the May-blood stires and glows, And the young year draws to the golden prime, And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,-- Then hey! for the ripple of laughing rhyme! (Quote by - Henry Austin Dobson)
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. (Quote by - Paul Engle)
The poet is the priest of the invisible. (Quote by - Wallace Stevens)
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. (Quote by - Plato)
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. (Quote by - Robert Penn Warren)
Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree. He doesn't eat much and doesn't read much, but listens well and is a most gracious host. (Quote by - Astrid Alauda)
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. (Quote by - Oscar Wilde)
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. (Quote by - Augustus William)
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. (Quote by - James Branch Cabell)
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. (Quote by - G. K. Chesterton)
You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. (Quote by - John Ciardi)
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. (Quote by - Edith Södergran)
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. (Quote by - Paul Valery)
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. (Quote by - Jean Cocteau)
The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice. (Quote by - Earle Birney)
No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. (Quote by - T. S. Eliot)
Poetry is all nouns and verbs. (Quote by - Marianne Moore)
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. (Quote by - Novalis)
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. (Quote by - Carl Sandburg)
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. (Quote by - Yevgeny Yentushenko)
Poetry is not always words. (Quote by - Audrey Foris)
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. (Quote by - Samuel Johnson)
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. (Quote by - Jean Cocteau)
Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock. (Quote by - Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. (Quote by - Edgar Allan Poe)
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully. (Quote by - Aristotle)
The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. (Quote by - Lionel Trilling)
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone. (Quote by - Thomas Hardy)
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (Quote by - Percy Byshe Shelley)
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. (Quote by - W.B. Yeats)
Therefore is a word the poet must not know. (Quote by - André Gide)
Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see. (Quote by - William Ellery Channing)
For there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed. (Quote by - Thomas Carlyle)
Poets and painters are outside the class system, or rather they constitute a special class of their own, like the circus people and the gypsies. (Quote by - Gerald Brenan)
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. (Quote by - Pablo Neruda)
The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. (Quote by - Aristotle)
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem. (Quote by - Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public. (Quote by - George Santayana)
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers. (Quote by - Horace)
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. (Quote by - Robert Graves)
A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. (Quote by - E. B. White)
The courage of the Poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. (Quote by - Christopher Morley)
The smell of ink is intoxicating to me - others may have wine, but I have poetry. (Quote by - Abbe Yeux-verdi)
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. (Quote by - Rita Dove)
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." (Quote by - Soren Kierkegaard)
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. (Quote by - Alfred de Musset)
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. (Quote by - Carl Sandburg)
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose (Quote by - words in their best order; poetry (Quote by - the best words in their best order. (Quote by - Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. (Quote by - John Cage)
A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (Quote by - T.S. Eliot)
Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought. (Quote by - Thomas Carlyle)
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry. (Quote by - William Butler Yeats)
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. (Quote by - Robinson Jeffers)
For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose. (Quote by - Sylvia Plath)
Poets aren't very useful, because they aren't consumeful or very produceful. (Quote by - Ogden Nash)
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. (Quote by - John Fitzgerald Kennedy)
If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets. (Quote by - Augustus William)
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. (Quote by - Percy Bysshe Shelley)
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. (Quote by - W. H. Auden)
A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. (Quote by - Randall Jarrell)
A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. (Quote by - Randall Jarell)
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. (Quote by - Samuel McChord Crothers)
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. (Quote by - John Keats)
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. (Quote by - Joseph Roux)
Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed? (Quote by - George Crabbe)
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." (Quote by - Robert Penn Warren)
Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. (Quote by - Paul Engle)
The poetry of the earth is never dead. (Quote by - John Keats)
Made poetry a mere mechanic art. (Quote by - William Cowper)
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. (Quote by - T. S. Eliot)
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. (Quote by - Joseph Joubert)
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity. (Quote by - Walter Mosley)
Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. (Quote by - Sigmund Freud)
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. (Quote by - Dylan Thomas)
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. (Quote by - Robert Frost)
Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal. (Quote by - J. M. Synge)
The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. (Quote by - Robert Penn Warren)
Poetry is life distilled. (Quote by - Gwendolyn Brooks)
An art in which the artist by means of rhythm and great sincerity can convey to others the sentiment which he feels about life. (Quote by - John Masefield)
It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. (Quote by - Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. (Quote by - Plutarch)
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. (Quote by - Lionel Trilling)
When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must. (Quote by - Oliver Wendell Holmes)
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. (Quote by - Jean Cocteau)
In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column: In the pentameter aye falling in melody back. (Quote by - Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse. (Quote by - George Gordon Noel Byron)
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. Dead Poet's Society)
For rhyme the rudder is of verses, With which, like ships, they steer their courses. (Quote by - Samuel Butler)
For me, poetry is an impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind. (Quote by - Maxwell Bodenheim)
The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. (Quote by - Edgar Allan Poe)
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. (Quote by - Kahlil Gibran)
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. (Quote by - W.B. Yeats)
Poetry is the language of a state of crisis. (Quote by - Stephane Mallarme)
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages. (Quote by - Oliver Wendell Holmes)
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. (Quote by - Christopher Fry)
Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart. (Quote by - Thomas Hill)
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else. (Quote by - Augustus William)
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. (Quote by - Wallace Stevens)
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. (Quote by - Carl Sandburg)
I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people. (Quote by - Robert Graves)
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. (Quote by - Charles Simic)
