Poetry Quotes

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.

~ W.h. Auden

There is an empty space next to you in the backseat of the station wagon. Make it the shape of everything you need. Now say hello.

~ Richard Siken

Victories turned inside outBut no surrenderCemeteries of remorseThe beaten champion sobbingGhosts move in to shield his tears

~ Adrienne Rich

The bag I wanted was beyond reason - something to hold my poems, twice as big as the universe and it must be androgynous.

~ Eileen Myles

A rose lay open in full bloomand, looking from my garden room,I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain.It seemed so fragile,resting there,and such a silence filled the air,the beauty of the moment caused me pain.What more? I thought. There must be more.As if in answer then, I sawone weighty drop that caused my rose to fall.It trembled, then cascaded downto earth just staining gentle brownand, since then, I've felt different.That's all.

~ Julie Andrews Edwards

UselessnessLet mine not be the saddest fate of all, To live beyond my greater self; to see My faculties decaying, as the tree Stands stark and helpless while its green leaves fall Let me hear rather the imperious call, Which all men dread, in my glad morning time, And follow death ere I have reached my prime, Or drunk the strengthening cordial of life's gall. The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest blast Which fells the green tree to the earth to-day Is kinder than the calm that lets it last, Unhappy witness of its own decay. May no man ever look on me and say, 'She lives, but all her usefulness is past.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Even though I seem not human, a mute shelfof glucose, bottled blood, machineryto swell the lung and pump the heart—even so,do not put out my life. Let me still glow.

~ Dudley Randall

Dear friend, I have searched all nightthrough each burnt paper,but I fear I will never findthe formula to let you die

~ Leonard Cohen

This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

~ T.s. Eliot

All paths lead to death, our premature sacrifice for future spawn(from Elixir)

~ Bryan Murphy

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

~ George Oppen

Because who hasn't tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity's lead coat?Who doesn't have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?

~ Lucia Perillo

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady’s album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

~ Gustave Flaubert

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

~ Wallace Stevens

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

~ Helen Vendler

. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.

~ A.e. Stallings

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

~ William Stafford

The bats inebriate the sky . . .

~ A.e. Stallings

A single wire hanger on a nail by itselfIsn't bad though a stack of them on a floorIs too gloomy for words.

~ Dara Weir

A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked.

~ Marty Rubin

I want to tell you why poetry is worth thinking about - from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things.Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that's about it. And that's really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names - Andrew Marvel, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rosetti, Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Christopher, Deborah Garrison, whoever, James Wright, Selima Hill, Troy Jollimore. Whoever they may be. Every so often you remember them. If you've memorised some poems, the poems will raise a glimmering finger in your memory once in a while, and that's very nice, as long as you keep it to yourself. Never recite. Please! If you recite, your listeners will look down and play with their cuticles. They will not like you. But sometimes if you quote just a phrase in passing, that can work. Like this: As Selima Hill says: 'A really good fuck makes me feel like custard.

~ Nicholson Baker

All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.

~ Eamon Grennan

He thinks my hair smells like spring rain. I'm really trying to remain stoic and unaffected. I remind myself that I don't like poetic language. I don't like poetry. I don't even like people who like poetry.But I'm not dead inside either.

~ Nicola Yoon

A poet is a feeling, sentient being, not a word machine.

~ Marty Rubin

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

~ Saul Bellow

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read the.

~ Henry David Thoreau

As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

That is why they have poets—to classify all the degrees of love. It is for scientists to classify the maladies arising from the want of it.

~ Sarah Ruhl

On a small table beside his chair were other haphazardly stacked volumes by such poets as Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, a dangerous crew to let into your head.

~ Dean Koontz

Did you know that Bharatiyar used the pen name “Shelley-dasan”? He admired the poems of Shelley so deeply that he wrote under the name “Shelley’s servant”. Wasn’t that a wonderful gesture of humility by someonewho was such a great poet himself? And later, Bharatiyar had his own dasan, the poet Subburathinam, who tookthe pen name Bharathidasan. Subburathinam’s poetry inspired yet another poet who wrote as Surada, short for Subburathina-dasan. And to think this long chain of inspiration spans centuries, going back to the poets who inspired Wordsworth, who inspired Shelley, who inspired our own Bharati.

~ Indu Muralidharan

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poet must be more useful than any other member if his tribe.

~ Comte De Lautréamont

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

~ Gary D. Schmidt

Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Young poets are too apt to consider themselves “children of the mist” – they must dwell apart from men and contemn their kind, or they fear they shall be only taken for common-place characters. They forget that poetry is the language which speaks to all hearts—and that instead of cherishing the sacred fire as a lonely light, as one that burns in a charnel house, they should bring it forth in its beauty and brightness as a guide to the pleasant places and sparkling waters of earth’s happiness and the radiant messenger of heaven’s exalted hopes. And they should rejoice and be glad that to them the kindling of such high imagination is given. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale Ladies Magazine, November 1830From the Introduction to Cherishing the Sacred Fire

~ Deborah L. Halliday

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

~ Robert Graves

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

~ Harley King

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

~ Adrienne Rich

Poets sing our human music for us.

~ Carol Ann Duffy