Poetry Quotes

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.

~ Lera Auerbach

Death defines life. I'd rather stay undefined.

~ Lera Auerbach

Failure is the new success.

~ Phil Volatile

If he had known unstructured space is a delugeand stocked his log house-boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. But obstinate hestated, The land is solid and stamped, watching his foot sink down through the stone up to his knee. From Progressive insanities of a pioneer

~ Margaret Atwood

Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country.

~ Robert Frost

Ninth Floorshe ran across the parquet slipped the flokati matcrashed the windownoshe stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise nightspread hernoshe tilted dived swanning spinningtip-toed ink air broke fingers firstnoshe climbed the small gap the window gavehung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breathfell ligament torn and sorrynoshe wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputteringleaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jacknothis is how it was:drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with griefroared the ungiving window frames which gaveshe spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voicedstreet lights crashed on herno.She did nothing.

~ Karin Schimke

If poetry dies, nothing lives !

~ Vihang A. Naik

Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

I tell you, if you feel strange, strange things will happen to you: Fallen peacocks on library shelves

~ Rita Dove

A drainless shower of light is poesy 'tis the supreme of power 'tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.

~ John Keats

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

~ Dylan Thomas

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.

~ Thomas Hardy

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

One of Wordsworth's Lake District neighbours remarked upon hearing of the poet's death I suppose his son will carry on the business.

~ Anonymous

Poetry is not a profession it's a destiny.

~ Mikhail Dudan

Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.

~ Stéphane Mallarmé

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.

~ Gerald Brenan

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

~ G. K. Chesterton

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

~ T. S. Eliot

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

~ Robert Graves

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

~ Robert Graves

The essentials of poetry are rhythm dance and the human voice.

~ Earle Birney

Colour which is the poet's wealth is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

~ Henry David Thoreau

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

~ E. B. White

Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.

~ William Ellery Channing

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.

~ Cyril Connolly

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

~ Wallace Stevens

A good poet is someone who manages in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning five or six times.

~ Randall Jarrell

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

~ Robert Frost

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

~ Robert Penn Warren

When a great poet has lived certain things have been done once for all and cannot be achieved again.

~ T. S. Eliot

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

~ J. M. Synge

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

~ T. S. Eliot

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

~ Marianne Moore

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is prose - words in their best order poetry - the best words in their best order.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

~ Christopher Morley

Science is for those who learn poetry for those who know.

~ Joseph Roux