Poetry Quotes

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

~ Charles Baudelaire

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.

~ James Gates Percival

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

~ Soren Kierkegaard

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.

~ Andres Segovia

The flame that is naturally clear always gives the most light and heat. If I could blend my talent for poetry and music into one, the light would burn still clearer, and I might go far.

~ Robert Schumann

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

~ Fernand Leger

I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

~ J. Carter Brown

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.

~ Jean De La Bruyère

We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.

~ Elvis Costello

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

~ Michael Graves

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

~ W. H. Auden

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

There are better ways we can transform this virulent hatred - by living our ideals, the Peace Corps, exchange students, teachers, exporting our music, poetry, blue jeans.

~ Helen Thomas

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

~ Satyajit Ray

The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.

~ Robert Morgan

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

~ Raymond Chandler

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

~ A. E. Housman

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

~ Marcel Duchamp

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

~ Andrew Motion

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

~ Christian Louboutin

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

~ Lord Byron

Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.

~ Goldwin Smith

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what's in style, what's current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

~ Robert Pinsky

Wine is bottled poetry.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

~ John Ruskin

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

~ James Fenton

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

~ Thomas Lynch

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

~ Joy Harjo

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

~ John F. Kennedy

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

~ Brooks Atkinson

Poetry, I think, intensifies the reader's experience. If it's a humorous facet of the story, poetry makes it more exuberant. If it's a sad facet, poetry can make it more poignant.

~ Vikram Seth

The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.

~ Johnny Depp

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

~ Jean Cocteau

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

~ Muhammad Iqbal

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

~ June Jordan

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

~ Seamus Heaney

Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.

~ Edward Hirsch