Poetry Quotes

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech."
-Henry David Thoreau

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."
-Oscar Wilde

"Writing a poem is discovering."
-Robert Frost

"I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling."
-T. S. Eliot

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

"Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet."
-Horace Mann

"All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry."
-G. K. Chesterton

"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things."
-Matthew Arnold

"Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread."
-Pablo Neruda

"A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits."
-Robert A. Heinlein

"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

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."
-William Wordsworth

"By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors."
-Thomas Babington Macaulay

"I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance."
-Arthur Rimbaud

"...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source."
-Billy Collins

"Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers."
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty."
-Muriel Rukeyser

"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."
-Paul Engle

"Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truthAll death will he annul, all tears assuage?Or fill these void veins full again with youthAnd wash with an immortal water age?"
-Wilfred Owen

"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

"Poetry is fact given over to imagery."
-Rod Mckuen

"Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do."
-Stephen Spender

"One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music."
-Stephen Sondheim

"To feel greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the naturalBeauty, is the sole business of poetry.The rest's diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason."
-Robinson Jeffers

"Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive."
-Alphonse De Lamartine

"My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life."
-Edith Sitwell

"The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing."
-Walt Whitman