All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde
Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost
Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.
Horace Mann
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
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 poem is no place for an idea.
Edgar Watson Howe
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
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
Robert A. Heinlein
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
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
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
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
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
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
In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
Phyllis Mcginley
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
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
My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.
Edith Sitwell
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
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.
Guillaume Apollinaire
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
Alphonse De Lamartine
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
Dennis Gabor
The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.
Walt Whitman
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
Charles Baudelaire
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
John Ciardi
My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.
Countee Cullen
No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky.
Llewelyn Powys
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
Carl Sandburg
Move him into the sun —Gently its touch awoke him once,At home, whispering of fields unsown.Always it woke him, even in France,Until this morning and this snow.
Wilfred Owen
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
James Dickey
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
Marianne Moore
Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
John Dryden
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves
A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It's easier to quote poets than to read them.
Allison Barrows
Good poetry .. makes the universe .. reveal its .. 'secret'.
Hafiz Of Persia
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.
M. C. Richards
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
Paul Dirac
My arms have mutinied against me — brutes!My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease.
Wilfred Owen
That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.
Galway Kinnell
Poetry is the deification of reality.
Edith Sitwell
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
A poet's hope: to be,like some valley cheese,local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. Auden
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery
He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.
John Colville
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Sir Walter Scott
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'
Cesare Lombroso
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,May creep back, silent, to still village wellsUp half-known roads.
Wilfred Owen
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.
William Shenstone
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 something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
Allen Ginsberg
I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Robert Penn Warren
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.
Peggy Noonan
The cliche is dead poetry.
Gerald Brenan
Some people have the time but they don't have time while others have time but do not have the time.
Jacques Prevert
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Jacques Maritain
Behold,A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.But the old man would not so, but slew his son...
Wilfred Owen
Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.
John Donne
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
We all write poems; it is simply that the poets are the ones who write in words.
John Fowles
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Muriel Rukeyser
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.
Joseph Roux
Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.
John Keats
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Jean Cocteau
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
Edward Young
A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou.
Edward Fitzgerald
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde
When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John F. Kennedy
When power leads man towards 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 his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.
John F. Kennedy
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Robert Frost
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Edgar Allan Poe
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Edgar Allan Poe
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
Edgar Allan Poe
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
Wine is bottled poetry.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Science arose from poetry--when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He was always creating things. He painted, he sketched, he wrote beautiful poetry.
Nancy Barr
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
Lewis Thomas
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
Frederick William Robertson
When athletes write poetry, it shows students (athletes) aren't all just macho - they can have a poetic side, too.
Lauren Manojlovich
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Archibald Macleish
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann
There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Lynd
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
John Masefield
He had a passion for democracy, for people to make informed decisions so they can think critically, ... He was rare blend of science and poetry and social consciousness.
Ann Druyan
They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
Peter Davison
Charity's excited to meet a real, live, fire-breathing dragon. But she discovers she's not evil ? she's kind and likes to write poetry, just like her ? so they have a bond.
Alice Besterman
If they want to know anything about poetry, they simply have to go out and learn it.
Peter Davison
Money is a kind of poetry.
Wallace Stevens
There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.
Stephane Mallarme
She has something to say about what life is like-which is all we ask of poetry.
Louis Untermeyer
Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.
Anna Jameson
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
It gave a sense of the possibilities of an alternative culture. And it wasn't just poetry that moved people. It was the sense of a community, of people with a vision.
Gary Snyder
It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.
Peter Steele
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
None of these worlds was incompatible. All of these people were around, and if you were at all interested in painting, poetry, or dance, you met them.
James Tenney
There are people in our community writing poetry. This brings it down home. Your friend next door could be writing poetry.
Amanda Cunningham
I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
Michael Graves
I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
John Ashbery
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
Joseph Roux
Ambiguity is Vajpayee's strength, ... His roots are in poetry and literature, and I think that's a big advantage.
Mahesh Rangarajan
I think great poetry is enormously powerful.
Michael Cunningham
I had a huge crush on my friend's older sister and I wasn't able to tell her. Poetry was a way of writing how I felt with out saying it.
Ronald Davis
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Georges Braque
The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. You just have to open up your heart and not be afraid to get them out.
Judy Collins
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.
Robert Graves
I want the poetry back in my life.
Gerald Levin
There's not that many venues for reading poetry around the Bay area anymore.
Jim Graves
This pattern is fundamental to probably all Japanese art, particularly the performing arts or poetry. The Japanese feel it's actually the rhythm of nature.... Nature is a continuous process of beginnings, accelerated development and quick endings.
Gary Mathews
It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
Jason Newsted
If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Joyce Carol Oates
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.
Peter Davison
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
William Rose Benet
He said, 'I can't teach someone how to write,' ... He just thought if you were a poet, you wrote poetry.
Anne Wright
His poetry was sufficiently important that it helped to put the university on the map from a literary standpoint.
William Andrews
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Lucille Clifton
Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.
Ani Difranco
I think more people should be reading it but maybe fewer people should be writing it, ... there's an abundance of unreadable poetry out there.
Billy Collins
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
Jim Morrison
[She was] the Judy Garland of American poetry.
James Dickey
It offers another way to learn as much as possible about poetry writing today.
Chris Murray
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
John Denham
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Marianne Moore
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
Basil Bunting
Poetry is the mother of superstition.
Thomas Sprat
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
Joyce Carey
If it were to be claimed that intentional verse is not yet poetry, then I would equally have the right to claim that the most consummate, most differentiated sound poems are no longer poetry but a singular imitation of another art: music or declamation.
Simon Vestdijk
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
Reynolds Price
The poetry of heroism appeals irresitably to those who don't go to a war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy.
Louis Ferdinand Celine
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
Charles Baudelaire
Poetry should be for the people. It always has been, ... Ted writes poetry for the people.
Dave Evans
This pastor is so progressive to embrace this poetry. Once you hear the words, it makes you think -- what can we do, where do we go from here?
Marcus Sibley
[Poetry] is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.
Lord Byron
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.
Gustave Flaubert
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
Peter Davison
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
Jose Marti
Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes).
Dr. Isaac Barrow
The night will be filled with human poetry of language and common threads of universal experience in their work.
Jeff Metcalf
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
Isaac Rosenberg
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
Being a dedicated writer and poet takes time, commitment and energy. You don't have time to drink or do drugs because you're pouring your time and energy into your poetry.
Lauren Manojlovich
Poetry-writing is a way to relieve stress.
Scott Gillespie
[Peckinpah said that what the two men had in common, and not just because it was the end of a long hard-drinking day, was their desire -- Dickey in his poetry, Peckinpah in his films --] to create images people cannot forget. ... I never did see him again.
Sam Peckinpah
We went to Canada to a cowboy poetry event a couple years ago, because I also do a little cowboy poetry.
Andy Nelson
He felt that the children brought him great pleasure. His daughter, who is a dancer and choreographer, he wrote poetry for her. He wrote poetry for his son, who also loves music. And he wrote poetry for me. He was a dedicated man. He was dedicated to his feelings.
Celia Jacobowitz
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence their importance.
George Arnold
Never before had a woman put such agonizing poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time in Detroit.
Diego Rivera
Poetry has passion, ... And passion has power to reach a person's soul in a way that words cannot.
Peter Boyce
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Robert Hass
I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
Peter Porter
Role models are huge, ... I started out writing poetry and might never have believed I could have a life as a playwright if Paula Vogel hadn't plucked me out and said 'you can do this for life.'
Sarah Ruhl
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Robert Fitzgerald
I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
Russell Baker
Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
Philip Levine
POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.
Ambrose Bierce
By 2000, he had embarked on an ambitious series of figure paintings, usually captioned with an aphorism from poetry or philosophy, and charged with stark physical and metaphysical deliberations.
William Peterson
There is no gilding of setting sun or glamour of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers wives.
Hamlin Garland
Art and music are an integral part of learning. You can't study English literature and poetry without learning a Shakespeare sonnet.
William Ferguson
I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world --- more precise than science.
David Whyte
I didn't start as a dialect poet, ... talked again and again about poetry.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Viktor Frankl
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
Maria Montessori
But nobody can write poetry all the time.
Peter Davison
It's originally a mathematical term, ... Something that veers off the line is eccentric, not concentric. If you look at the poetry of that, there really isn't anything wrong with going off the line and exploring different things.
Crispin Glover
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