Poetry Quotes

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

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

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

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

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

God is the perfect poet.

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

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

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.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

The crown of literature is poetry.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

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

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

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

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

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

He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

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

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

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

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

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

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

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

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

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

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.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Every single soul is a poem.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

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

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

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

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

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

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

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

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

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

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

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

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

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

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

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

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

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.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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

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

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

My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.

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

I like poems that are little games.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

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

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

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

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.