Poetry Quotes

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

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

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.
Thomas Harrison

A poem is never finished,it's only abandoned.
Paul Valery

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

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

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

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

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

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

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

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A. E. Housman
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a painting speaks.
Plutarch

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg

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