Poetry Quotes

She was a Phantom of delightWhen first she gleam'd upon my sight;A lovely Apparition, sentTo be a moment's ornament:Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;But all things else about her drawnFrom May-time and the cheerful dawn;A dancing shape, an image gay,To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

~ William Wordsworth

Not words. nor laughter. but rather someonewho will fall in lovewith your silence.

~ Sanober Khan

The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.

~ Wallace Stevens

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.

~ Bashō Matsuo

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

~ Sylvia Plath

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

~ Jack Gilbert

And watch two men washing clothes,one makes dry clothes wet. The other makes wet clothes dry. they seem to be thwarting each other, but their work is a perfect harmony.Every holy person seems to have a different doctrine and practice, but there's really only one work.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's better to swim in the sea belowThan to swing in the air and feed the crow,Says jolly Ned Teach of Bristol.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

~ Louise Glück

Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.

~ Warsan Shire

Darling, do you rememberthe man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.

~ Stanley Kunitz

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

~ John Donne

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

~ W.h. Auden

Ye are better than all the balladsThat ever were sung or said;For ye are living poems,And all the rest are dead.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

~ William Shakespeare

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

~ Nick Hornby

I do think the barsThat kept my spirit in are burst - that IAm sailing with thee through the dizzy sky!How beautiful thou art!

~ John Keats

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

~ Billy Collins

A door jumpsout from shadows,then jumps away. Thisis what I've come to find:the back door, unlatched.Tooled by insular wind, itslams and slamswithout meaningto and without meaning.

~ Li-Young Lee

The fountains mingle with the river,And the rivers with the ocean; The winds of heaven mix forever,With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single;All things by a law divine In one another's being mingle:— Why not I with thine? See! the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother; And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea:— What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

There came one and knocked at the door of the Beloved.And a voice answered and said, 'Who is there?'The lover replied, 'It is I.''Go hence,' returned the voice;'there is no room within for thee and me.'Then came the lover a second time and knocked and again the voice demanded,'Who is there?'He answered, 'It is thou.''Enter,' said the voice, 'for I am within.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

~ Seth Godin

I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I hear a man climb stairsand clear his throat outside our door.

~ Leonard Cohen

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

~ Julian Barnes

Think of what starlight And lamplight would lack Diamonds and fireflies If they couldn’t lean against Black. . . .

~ Mary O'neill

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

~ Alfred Tennyson

I held a jewel in my fingers And went to sleep. The day was warm, and winds were prosy; I said: 'T will keep.I woke and chid my honest fingers,—The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own.

~ Emily Dickinson

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.

~ K.j. Parker

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Poetry makes nothing happen.

~ W.h. Auden

What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare?

~ W.h. Davies

The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.

~ Wallace Stevens

loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shapeof a helicopter the same size as the helicopterand that's it's only skilland it isn't good enoughbut it's still amazing.

~ Tao Lin

When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyleatop some crumbling building,spring to lifea resuscitated angel.

~ Saul Williams

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

~ Nicholson Baker

A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.

~ Thomas Aquinas

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,the dreamed as well as the lived—what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

~ Louise Glück

I had forgotten. Disgust shadows desire.Another life is never safely envied.

~ Robert Wells