Poetry Quotes - Page 2

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

Stéphane Mallarmé

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

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.

G.K. Chesterton

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

T.S Eliot

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.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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.

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

The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.

Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Henry David Thoreau

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.

E B White

Poetry the eldest sister of all arts and parent of most.

William Congreve

Poetry is the Devil's wine.

Poetry therefore we will call Musical Thought.

All that is not prose passes for poetry.

Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme.

Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty.

Gilfillan

Let your poem be kept nine years.

Horace

With me poetry has not been a purpose but a passion.

Edgar Allan Poe

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The reader who is illuminated is in a real sense the poem.

H. M. Tomlinson

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

Voltaire

An art in which the artist by means of rhythm and great sincerity can convey to others the sentiment which he feels about life.

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

Phyllis McGinley

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.

Aristotle

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.

Poets aren't very useful because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.

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

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right.

Rudyard Kipling

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

Maxwell Bodenheim

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.

William Ellery Channing

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.

Randall Jarrell

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Robert Penn Warren

When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.

T.S Eliot

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

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.

T.S Eliot

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose - words in their best order poetry - the best words in their best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Christopher Morley

Science is for those who learn poetry for those who know.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

George Santayana

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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.

T.S Eliot

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

William Butler Yeats

Poetry is a mug's game.

T.S Eliot

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.

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

I was promised on a time To have reason for my rhyme From that time unto this season I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.

A drainless shower of light is poesy 'tis the supreme of power 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.

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.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Wallace Stevens

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