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.
-W. Somerset Maugham
Poetry is the language
in which man explores is own amazement...
says heaven and earth in one word...
speaks of himself and his predicament
as though for the first time...
-Christopher Fry
Poetry is the universal language
which holds the heart with nature and itself.
-William Hazlitt
My poems are hymns of praise
to the glory of life.
-Edith Sitwell
All poetry is putting the infinite
with the finite.
-Robert Browning
Poetry is the deification of reality.
-Edith Sitwell
I will not make a poem
nor the least part of a poem
but has reference to the soul,
But having look'd at the objects of the universe,
I find there is no one nor any particle of one
but has reference to the soul.
-Walt Whitman
Poetry is the shorthand
of the soul.
-Ann Ree Colton
True poetry is a quality of the inner life.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivnahov
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak,
and saying, with as little concealment at possible,
what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.
-Galway Kinnell
The true poem is the poet's mind.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
As to the pure mind all things are pure,
so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It's not everyday
that the world arranges itself in a poem.
-Wallace Stevens
Poetry begins...
when we look from the center outward.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
The finest poetry was first experience.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
-Charles Bukowski
Poetry must have something in it
that is barbaric, vast and wild.
-Denis Diderot
A poet looks at the world
the way a man looks at a woman.
-Wallace Stevens
Poetry is not an expression of the party line.
It is that time of night, lying in bed,
thinking what you really think,
making the private world public,
that's what the poet does.
-Alan Ginsburg
To translate a poem from thinking into English
takes all night.
-Grace Paley
Wanted: a need swift enough
to sew this poem into a blanket.
-Charles Simic
The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle;
unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
-Theodore Roethke
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought
and the thought has found words.
-Robert Frost
Poetry is...clear expression of mixed feelings.
-W. H. Auden
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought
in such a manner as to excite the imagination
most powerfully and delightfully.
-William Cullen Bryant
I want a fever, in poetry;
a fever, and tranquillity.
-James Dickey
A poem is a meteor.
-Wallace Stevens
Poetry is thoughts that breathe,
and words that burn.
-Thomas Gray
If I read a book
and it makes my whole body
so cold fire can never warm me,
I know that is poetry.
If I feel physically
as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry.
-Emily Dickinson
Poetry is a way
of taking life by the throat.
-Robert Frost
Poetry is language at its most distilled
and most powerful.
-Rita Dove
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power.
Poetry is boned with ideas,
nerved and blooded with emotion,
all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
-Paul Engle
All good poetry is forged
slowly and patiently,
link by link,
with sweat and blood and tears.
-Alfred Douglas
One must be drenched in words,
literally soaked in them,
to have the right ones form themselves
into the proper pattern at the right moment.
-Hart Crane
There is a pleasure in poetic pains
Which only poets know.
-William Cowper
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry is like making a joke.
If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke,
you've lost the whole thing.
-W. S. Merwin
It is the poet's pleasure
to withhold a little of his meaning,
to intensify by mystification.
He unzips the veil from beauty,
but does not remove it.
-E. B. White
Poetry is as precise as geometry.
-Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is the mathematics of writing
and closely akin to music.
-John Steinbeck
Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.
-Thomas Carlyle
The truth of a poem is its form and content,
its music and its meaning are the same.
-Muriel Rukeyser
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure
with truth.
-Samuel Johnson
Poetry is truth
dwelling in beauty.
-Robert Gilfillan
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
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive
and widely effective mode of saying things.
-Matthew Arnold
A beautiful line of verse
has twelve feet and two wings.
-Renard
Poetry is the rhythmical creation
of beauty in words.
-Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is the achievement
of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
-Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the exquisite expression
of exquisite expressions.
-Joseph Roux
Poetry is frosted fire.
-J. Patrick Lewis
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove
the poem must ride on its own melting.
-Robert Frost
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
-Archibald MacLeish
Poetry is like a bird,
it ignores all frontiers.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Poetry is an echo,
asking a shadow to dance.
-Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows,
and of lending existence to nothing.
-Edmund Burke
Poetry is the impish attempt
to paint the color of the wind.
-Max Bodenheim
All poets love dust and mist
because all the last answers
Go running back to dust and mist.
-Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an orphan of silence.
The words never quite equal
the experience behind them.
-Charles Simic
Poetry is what gets lost
in the translation.
-Robert Frost
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art
before it was a written art.
-Jorge Luis Borges
The writing of a poem
is like a child throwing stones into a mindshaft.
You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
-James Fenton
Most people read poetry listening for echoes
because the echoes are familiar to them.
They wade through it the way a boy wades through water,
feeling with his toes for the bottom:
The echoes are the bottom.
-Wallace Stevens
In a poem
echo is as important as silence.
-Edmond Jabes
Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle,
cracked ice crunching in pails,
the night that numbs the leaf,
the duel of two nightingales,
the sweet pea that runs wild,
Creations's tears in shoulder blades.
-Boris Pasternak
My ear is not working, my poetry ear.
I can't write a line
that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.
-Jane Kenyon
All good poetry
is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
-William Wordsworth
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments
of the happiest and best minds.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks,
waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
-Carl Sandburg
Breathe in experience,
breathe out poetry -
-Muriel Rukeyser
A poem is always married to someone.
-Rene Char
A poet never takes notes.
You never take notes in a love affair.
-Robert Frost
The eye is the notebook
of the poet.
-James Russell Lowell
To be a poet, most of all, to see.
-Henrik Ibsen
Poetry is a peerless proficiency
of the imagination.
-Marianne Moore
And, as imagination bodies forth,
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
-William Shakespeare
A good poem
is like finding a hole in the palace wall -
never know what you might see.
-Hafiz
Poetry is the art
of creating imaginary gardens
with real toads.
-Marianne Moore
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts.
That's because they're not interested in the facts,
only the truth.
-William Faulkner
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
-John Ciardi
Poetry is a liquid voice
that can wear through stone.
-Adrienne Rich
A poem need not have a meaning
and like most things in nature
often does not have.
-Wallace Stevens
Poetry has no utility
save for the soul's delight.
-Joseph Joubert
A poem should not mean
But be.
-Archibald MacCleish
Poetry makes nothing happen,
it survives
In the valley of its saying.
-W. H. Auden
Poetry is indispensable -
if only I knew what for.
-Jean Cocteau
What is poetry?
The suggestion, by the imagination,
of nobler grounds for the noble emotions.
-D. H. Lawrence
Poetry is the common carrier
for the transportation of the public
to higher places
than other wheels can carry it.
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes
and unveils the meaning of things
upon which the heart and the eyes dwell.
-Edith Sitwell
It's part of a poet's work
to show each man what he sees
but does not know he sees.
-Edith Sitwell
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 of the universe,
helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself
and the world around him.
-Dylan Thomas
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
Poetry, like the moon,
does not advertise anything.
-William Bussett
Poetry is a raid on the inarticulate.
-T. S. Eliot
Genuine poetry can communicate
before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
A poem has secrets
that the poet knows nothing of.
-Stanley Kunitz
I have written some poetry
I don't understand myself.
-Carl Sandburg
A vein of poetry
exists in the hearts of all men.
-Thomas Carlyle
We all write poems;
it is simply that poets are the ones
who write in words.
-John Fowles
My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.
-Henry David Thoreau
If you cannot be a poet,
be the poem.
-David Carradine
In order to write poetry,
you must first invent a poet who will write it.
-Antonio Machado
I am obviously not orthodox,
I don't know how many real poets have ever been orthodox.
-R. S. Thomas
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
-Robert Graves
The art of life, a poet's life,
is, not having anything to do,
to do something.
-Henry David Thoreau
Poetry must be new as foam
and as old as the rock.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
into the street of the sky
light walks scattering poems.
-e e cummings
Poetry is the art of putting the ocean into a glass.
-Italo Calvino
Poetry is life distilled.
-Gwendolyn Brooks
A poem is like a wine glass
in which you can hold up a little bit of reality
and taste it.
-Gwen Harwood
Poetry is a packsack
of invisible keepsakes.
-Carl Sandburg
The purpose of poetry
is to make life complete in itself.
-Wallace Stevens
I am looking for a poem that says Everything
so I don't have to write anymore.
-Tukaram
A perfect poem is impossible.
Once it had been written,
the world would end.
-Robert Graves
The sources of poetry
are in the spirit seeking completeness.
-Muriel Rukeyser
I find purer philosophy in a Poem
than in a Conclusion in Geometry,
a chemical analysis or a physical law.
-Wilfred Owen
