Poetry - Quotes

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

A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. - Edgar Allan Poe

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

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things. - Honore de Balzac

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. - Edgar Allan Poe

Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavour of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one. - Jane Hirshfield

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world. - Seamus Heaney

I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference. - Anne Carson

In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love. - J. M. Coetzee

Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. - Edgar Allan Poe

No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it. - Edgar Watson Howe

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem. - Tracy K. Smith

On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity. - Pablo Neruda

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it. - Rumi

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

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. - Robert Frost

Poetry is an orphan of silence. - Charles Simic

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist – or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. - F. Scott Fitzerald

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

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing. - W.S. Merwin

Poetry is never a sensible choice on financial grounds. Burglary beats poetry, when it comes to making money. - Garrison Keillor

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering – I mean remembering in words – what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives. - Mary Oliver

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. - Dennis Gabor

Poetry is prose in slow motion. - Nicholson Baker

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance. - Matthew Arnold

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind. - Maxwell Bodenheim

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. - Adrienne Rich

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

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. - Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

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

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. - William Hazlitt

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth – the true poet is very near the oracle. - Edwin Hubble Chapin

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

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. - Joseph Roux

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. - Robert Frost

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. - Dylan Thomas

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling … A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually – that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too, but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling. - Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage. - Charles Dickens

Poetry moves heaven and earth. - Japanese Proverb

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned. - Emma Lazarus

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We’re involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We’re always going to need it. - Edward Hirsch

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives. - Aberjhani

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it. - Hannah Arendt

Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyse and purify it. - Eliza Cook

Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent – creating superhuman excellences – that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust. - Charles William Day

Poets must, it seems to me, learn how to use a great many words before they can know how to use a few skilfully. Journalistic verbiage is not fluency. - Marsden Hartley

Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself. - Walter Savage Landor

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. - T. S. Eliot

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot. - W. H. Auden

The crown of literature is poetry. - Matthew Arnold

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. - Robert Penn Warren

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

What's poetry? It's not real but maybe it's more than real. It's dreaming while you're awake. - Caryl Churchill

We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. - Percy Shelly

Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share. - Gregory Orr

Writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared. - Ceasare Pavese

You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading. - Adam Phillips