Poetry Quotes:
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Rita Dove
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Lionel Trilling
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
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.
Mark Van Doren
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Allen Ginsberg
He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.
John Clare
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.
A. E. Housman
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.
M. H. Abrams
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
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
Paul Muldoon
There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine
No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?
John Barton
Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.
John Barton
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Georges Braque
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.
William Cullen Bryant
I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.
Henry Austin Dobson
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.
Marilyn Hacker
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.
Anne Stevenson
Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
Anne Stevenson
I like poems that are little games.
Peter Davison
Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Mark Strand
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
Bob Dylan
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
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 just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Aristotle
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
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.
Socrates
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.
John F. Kennedy
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Khalil Gibran
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright