Poetry Quotes

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

~ George Santayana

Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poet's mind is ... a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings phrases images which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

~ T. S. Eliot

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

~ William Butler Yeats

Poetry is a mug's game.

~ T. S. Eliot

A poem begins with a lump in the throat a homesickness or alovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

~ Robert Frost

An art in which the artist by means of rhythm and great sincerity can convey to others the sentiment which he feels about life.

~ John Masefield

Not reading poetry amounts to a national pastime here.

~ Phyllis Mcginley

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skilfully.

~ Aristotle

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

~ Robert Frost

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.

~ Walt Whitman

Poets aren't very useful because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.

~ Ogden Nash

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

~ Robert Frost

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.

~ Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.

~ Carl Sandburg

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.

~ Maxwell Bodenheim

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

~ Sylvia Plath

I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.

~ Anaïs Nin

By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.

~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer.

~ Joseph Brodsky

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

~ Patti Smith

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.

~ Sesshu Foster

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

~ William H. Gass

why be bothered with other people's set-ups? it only leads to torture.

~ Bob Dylan

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

~ Oscar Wilde

Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

~ Emily Dickinson

Once I knew what I was doingI was there and with it,I had the total knowing.I Googled God and orgasmedAt the amount of Gods andMonsters out there posted about.

~ Initially No

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

~ Ray Bradbury

... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...

~ John Geddes

Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.

~ Harold Frederic

For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.

~ Garcilaso De La Vega

I have heard queens' swans, moved a man to cry,heard Bach played in the Metro on guitars.I have made love in Paris. Let me die.

~ Jennifer Reeser

The breath of Paris pushes at my shutters.From the Balcony

~ Jennifer Reeser

He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.

~ Simon Van Booy

Why should I have been surprised?Hunters walk the forestwithout a sound.The hunter, strapped to his rifle,the fox on his feet of silk,the serpent on his empire of muscles—all move in a stillness,hungry, careful, intent.Just as the cancerentered the forest of my body,without a sound.

~ Mary Oliver

My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous massof post-human organic circuitry.Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.My love is a man-machine interface gun.

~ Yann Rousselot

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

~ T. S. Eliot

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

~ Rafael Moneo

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.

~ Lascelles Abercrombie