Quotes on poetry
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
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Richard Rosen Quotes
Poets are like magicians, searching for magical phrases to pull rabbits out of people's souls.
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Glade Byron Addams Quotes
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
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Edith Södergran Quotes
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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Jean Cocteau Quotes
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.
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Robinson Jeffers Quotes
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton Quotes
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.
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Dylan Thomas Quotes
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
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James Branch Cabell Quotes
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
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Edmund Burke Quotes
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
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T.S. Eliot Quotes
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."
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Robert Penn Warren Quotes
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
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Jean Cocteau Quotes
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
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Novalis Quotes
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
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George Sand Quotes
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
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Robert Frost Quotes
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.
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W.B. Yeats Quotes
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.
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Christopher Fry Quotes
You can't write poetry on the computer.
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Quentin Tarantino Quotes
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.
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E. B. White Quotes
Be obscure clearly.
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E. B. White Quotes
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
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Robert Frost Quotes
Your prayer can be poetry, and poetry can be your prayer.
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Noelani Day Quotes
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
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Alfred de Musset Quotes
A sold poem loses half its meaning.
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Glade Byron Addams Quotes
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
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Robert Frost Quotes
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.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
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."
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Soren Kierkegaard Quotes
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
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Carl Sandburg Quotes
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
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Carl Sandburg Quotes
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
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Carl Sandburg Quotes
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
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Stephen Mallarme Quotes
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
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Rita Dove Quotes
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
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Robert Frost Quotes
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.
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W.H. Auden Quotes
A poem begins with a lump in the throat.
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Robert Frost Quotes
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
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W.B. Yeats Quotes
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
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Joseph Roux Quotes
Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
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Ezra Pound Quotes
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
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Charles Simic Quotes
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
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Allen Tate Quotes
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
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Robert Graves Quotes
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.
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Aristotle Quotes
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.
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Horace Quotes
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
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Rene Char Quotes
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
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Leonard Cohen Quotes
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
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Lionel Trilling Quotes
Poetry is life distilled.
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Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
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Salvatore Quasimodo Quotes
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.
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Paul Engle Quotes
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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E.M. Forster Quotes
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
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John Keats Quotes
Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
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Philip Larkin Quotes
"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.
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André Gide Quotes
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.
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Astrid Alauda Quotes
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.
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Thomas Hill Quotes
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.
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Pablo Neruda Quotes
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
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Sainte-Beuve Quotes
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.
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A.E. Housman Quotes
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.
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William Bolitho Quotes
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.
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Samuel McChord Crothers Quotes
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
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Robert Frost Quotes
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
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Thomas Hardy Quotes
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
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William Hazlitt Quotes
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
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Plato Quotes
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
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Carl Sandburg Quotes
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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Wallace Stevens Quotes
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
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Oscar Wilde Quotes