Poetry Quotes

Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends.

~ David Whyte

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

~ Mary Gordon

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

~ Billy Collins

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

~ Edwin Morgan

My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.

~ Guy Johnson

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

~ Maya Angelou

To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit: it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse. To design is to transform prose into poetry.

~ Paul Rand

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

~ Beverley Nichols

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

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

~ Robert Green Ingersoll

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

~ Lascelles Abercrombie

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.

~ Jonas Mekas

My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.

~ Eve Ensler

Poetry allies itself with beauty - a supreme union - but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.

~ Saint John Perse

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

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

~ Anna Quindlen

I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.

~ Roberto Benigni

If our hearts are ready for anything, we are touched by the beauty and poetry and mystery that fill our world.

~ Tara Brach

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 C. Bryant

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

~ Ishmael Reed

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.

~ Billy Collins

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

~ Muhammad Iqbal

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

~ Robert Frost

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

~ Claudia Rankine

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

~ Virginia Woolf

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

~ Jerry Hall

When you're going through something, whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody, you often feel like 'Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed; I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact, poetry's a nice reminder that, no, everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

~ Caroline Kennedy

I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I've always read poetry; I've always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.

~ Lorde

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

~ Robert Graves

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

~ Federico Fellini

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

~ Walter Scott

My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me.

~ Sarah Kay

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

~ Billy Collins

The olive branch has been consecrated to peace, palm branches to victory, the laurel to conquest and poetry, the myrtle to love and pleasure, the cypress to mourning, and the willow to despondency.

~ Dorothea Dix