Poetry Quotations
Authors that have more than 2 quotes:
W.H. Auden,
Jean Cocteau,
Robert Frost,
John Keats,
Carl Sandburg,
Oscar Wilde,
William Butler Yeats
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| The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. |
| - Aristotle |
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| It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. |
| - W.H. Auden |
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| A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere. |
| - W.H. Auden |
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| What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? |
| - W.H. Auden |
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| If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. |
| - Unknown Author |
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| Always be a poet, even in prose. |
| - Charles Baudelaire |
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| Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich. |
| - William Bolitho |
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| God is the perfect poet. |
| - Robert Browning |
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| He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. |
| - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton |
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| Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. |
| - Edmund Burke |
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| Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. |
| - James Branch Cabell |
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| There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. |
| - John Cage |
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| A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. |
| - René Char |
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| All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. |
| - Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
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| Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. |
| - Gilbert Keith Chesterton |
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| You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. |
| - John Ciardi |
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| You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. |
| - John Ciardi |
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| The freedom of poetic license. |
| - Cicero |
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| A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. |
| - Jean Cocteau |
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| Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. |
| - Jean Cocteau |
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| The poet doesn't invent. He listens. |
| - Jean Cocteau |
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| The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. |
| - Jean Cocteau |
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| The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. |
| - Jean Cocteau |
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| A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. |
| - Samuel McChord Crothers |
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| Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. |
| - T.S. Eliot |
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| Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. |
| - T.S. Eliot |
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| 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 |
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| Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. |
| - Gustave Flaubert |
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| A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. |
| - E.M. Forster |
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| Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. |
| - Sigmund Freud |
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| Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| A poem begins with a lump in the throat. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| Poetry is what gets lost in translation. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. |
| - Robert Frost |
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| Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. |
| - Kahlil Gibran |
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| "Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. |
| - André Gide |
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| One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. |
| - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
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| There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. |
| - Robert Graves |
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| If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow. |
| - Terri Guillemets |
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| If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. |
| - Thomas Hardy |
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| Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. |
| - William Hazlitt |
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| A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. |
| - Robert A. Heinlein |
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| Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart. |
| - Thomas Hill |
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| Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet. |
| - Horace |
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| No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers. |
| - Horace |
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| Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out.... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. |
| - Alfred Edward Housman |
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| A poem is no place for an idea. |
| - Edgar Watson Howe |
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| Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. |
| - Samuel Johnson |
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| You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. |
| - Joseph Joubert |
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| Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance. |
| - John Keats |
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| Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. |
| - John Keats |
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| The poetry of the earth is never dead. |
| - John Keats |
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| Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. |
| - Eli Khamarov |
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| A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." |
| - Soren Kierkegaard |
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| Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. |
| - Thomas Babington Macaulay |
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| Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. |
| - Don Marquis |
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| The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. |
| - William Somerset Maugham |
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| A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. |
| - Henry Louis Mencken |
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| Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did. |
| - Christopher Morley |
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| Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. |
| - Alfred de Musset |
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| Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. |
| - Plato |
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| Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. |
| - Edgar Allan Poe |
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| The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. |
| - Edgar Allan Poe |
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| Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. |
| - Joseph Roux |
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| He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. |
| - George Sand |
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| I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. |
| - Carl Sandburg |
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| Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. |
| - Percy bysshe Shelley |
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| Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. |
| - Percy bysshe Shelley |
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| Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. |
| - Charles Simic |
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| Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. |
| - Allen Tate |
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| You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. |
| - Dylan Thomas |
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| A poem is never finished, only abandoned. |
| - Paul Valéry |
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| The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. |
| - Robert Penn Warren |
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| The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." |
| - Robert Penn Warren |
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| A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. |
| - E.B. White |
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| The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing. |
| - Walt Whitman |
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| To have great poets there must be great audiences too. |
| - Walt Whitman |
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| A poet can survive everything but a misprint. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
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| He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
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| I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. |
| - Oscar Wilde |
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| Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. |
| - William Butler Yeats |
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| The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. |
| - William Butler Yeats |
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| Who can tell the dancer from the dance? |
| - William Butler Yeats |
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