Poetry Quotations

Poetry Quotations

Poetry has been around for thousands of years. Like other forms of literature, poetry is written to share ideas, express emotions, and create imagery.

Poetry is connected to aesthetics, or anything that is beautiful in the world. It can help writers express their emotions and can in turn help readers connect to those emotions.

Poetry can provide comfort and boost mood during periods of stress, trauma and grief.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? —Virginia Woolf

It takes a lot of desperation, dissatisfaction, and disillusion to write a few good poems. —Charles Bukowski

Oh, speak no ill of poetry, for ’tis a holy thing. —Lydia Huntley Sigourney

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. —Robert Grave

Poetry—but what is poetry. —Wislawa Szymborska

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. —Wilfred Owen

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry. —Emily Dickinson

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful, you find coexistence; it breaks walls down. —Mahmoud Darwish

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters. … But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk. —Charles Baudelaire

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough. —Erica Jong

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet. —Bob Dylan

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon. —Linton Kwesi Johnson

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart. —Edith Sitwell

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. —Don Marquis

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer. … He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. —E. B. White

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

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

Poetry is the heart of the soul. ― Laura Chouette

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. —Audre Lorde

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does. —Allen Ginsberg

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere. —Henry David Thoreau

The poet is the priest of the invisible. —Wallace Stevens

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies and sparkle in its brightness. —James Gates Percival

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

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. —June Jordan

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

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. —Emily Dickinson

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

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur. —Diane Ackerman

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me. —Eugenio Montale

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

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. ― Charles Darwin

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 of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him. ― Dylan Thomas

The crown of literature is poetry. ― W. Somerset Maugham

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. ― Paul Engle

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause. ― Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning. ― Stanley Kunitz

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination. ― Ishmael Reed

The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. ― Ernest Hemingway

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 what gets lost in translation. ― Robert Frost

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

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ― Robert Frost

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

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief-everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies. ― F. Sionil Jose

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

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails 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 just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ― Leonard Cohen

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

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. ― Edgar Allan Poe

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. ― Edgar Allan Poe

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary. ― Edgar Allan Poe

When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy. ― Matsuo Bashō

Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.― Matsuo Bashō

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

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

What can be explained is not poetry. ― W.B. Yeats

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. ― George Eliot

Always be a poet, even in prose. ― Charles Baudelaire

Poetry is the heart of the soul. ― Laura Chouette

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. ― Charles Bukowski

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. ― W.H. Auden

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. ― Gustave Flaubert

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun…. there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…. nor look through the eyes of the dead…. nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. ― Walt Whitman

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ― Novalis

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. ― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. ― Jack Kerouac

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations. ― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The poetry of the earth is never dead. ― John Keats

A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys. ― Barbara Holland

One of the best partners in writing? A cat! ― Primadonna Angela

If you want to write, keep cats. ~ Aldous Huxley

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry and those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves instead of running away from them. ― Nikita Gill

Poetry = Anger x Imagination ― Sherman Alexie

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape. ― John Fowles

Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you. ― Jim Morrison

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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these. ― T.S. Eliot

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril. ― Andrew Motion

Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off. ― Philip Larkin

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? ― Virginia Woolf

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. ― Randall Jarell

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains. ― Criss Jami

Poetry: the best words in the best order. ― Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head. ― G.K. Chesterton

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them. ― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is the eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them. ― Friedrich Nietzsche

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. ― Czeslaw Milosz

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? ― Virginia Woolf

She lives the poetry she cannot write. ― Oscar Wilde

Don’t you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back? ― L.M. Montgomery


Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem. — Jean Burden

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all. ― John Keats

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure. ― George Eliot

The world needs poetry now more than ever. It’s the only thing that can keep music from copying itself and sounding the same. ― Lana Del Rey

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. ― Mark Strand

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. ― Adrienne Rich

There’s two kinds of women–those you write poems about and those you don’t. ― Jeffrey McDaniel

If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don’t plagiarize or take “on loan”. There’s always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who’ll trip you up and laugh when you fall. ― Morrissey

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you’re merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that’s always easiest. ― John Berryman

Poetry is near to vital truth than history. ― Plato

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say in the bus, in the news, or just what’a in your heart. ― Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ― Rrita Dove

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. ― Mary Oliver

Always be a poet, even in prose. — Charles Baudelaire

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

It is a test [that] genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. — T. S. Eliot

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. ― George Eliot

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary. ― Edgar Allan Poe

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

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. ― Mary Oliver

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

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It’s the crack cocaine of the literary world. ― Jasper Fforde

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry and those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves instead of running away from them. ― Nikita Gill

Mathematics and poetry are the two ways to drink the beauty of truth. ― Amit Ray

Your poetry–it doesn’t deserve to be locked away, hidden from the rest of the world. And neither do you. ― Tessa Emily Hall

Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can’t understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves. ― Saul Bellow

With the city like this, don’t we have greater needs than poetry? ― China Miéville

Poetry is the sound of the human animal. ― Suniti Namjoshi

I think 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. ― John Keats

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

Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows. ― Aase Berg

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

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality. ― Muriel Rukeyser

Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help. ― Thom Gunn

Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows.― Aase Berg

Like poetry, in times of intense emotion the image returns to me. Like poetry, it stroked my soul and, by turns, lulled and stoked my senses. ― Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person… ― Czeslaw Milosz

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. ― John Cage

Poetry is an orphan of silence. ― Charles Simic

I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love. ― Jane Austen

Poetry is breathing words that give a reader pause. ― Ankita Singhal

…wisely mingled poetry and prose. ― Louisa May Alcott

The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated. ― Richelle E. Goodrich

You wear poetry in your eyes. ― Laraib Zakir

QUOTATIONS impart WISDOM
QUOTATIONS give INSIGHT
QUOTATIONS MOTIVATE
QUOTATIONS INSPIRE
QUOTATIONS EMPOWER