Poetry Quotes

We do not want to leave the topic of poetry, so here is an interesting collection of quotes related to poetry. These quotes will be helpful in expressing the meaning and importance of poetry and many much more.

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.
T. S. Eliot

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Khalil Gibran

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen

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.
Salman Rushdie

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Plutarch

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
John Barton

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
John Ruskin

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Horace

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Carl Sandburg

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
David Carradine

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Walt Whitman

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens

Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.
Andre Gide

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Rita Dove

Every single soul is a poem.
Michael Franti

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.
A. E. Housman

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

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
Jose Bergamin

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
Marilyn Hacker

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
John Barton

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Marianne Moore

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
M. H. Abrams

The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich

I like poems that are little games.
Peter Davison

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
Douglas Dunn

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Mark Strand

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.
Charles Olson

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
Anne Stevenson

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
Anne Stevenson

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
Octavio Paz