Poetry Quotes: Verses to Inspire and Enchant (Page 3)

"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, Poet

"Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it"

Vincent Van Gogh, Artist

"I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry"

John Donne, Poet

"Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft"

David Hockney, Artist

"If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel"

Jim Morrison, Musician

"Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls"

James Russell Lowell, Poet

"Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you"

Jim Morrison, Musician

"In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well"

Paul Valery, Poet

"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing"

Edmund Burke, Statesman

"The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

"If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy"

Muhammad Iqbal, Poet

"Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy"

Muhammad Iqbal, Poet

"Wine is bottled poetry"

Robert Louis Stevenson, Writer

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry"

William Butler Yeats, Poet

"Why should poetry have to make sense?"

Charlie Chaplin, Actor

"Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private"

Allen Ginsberg, Poet

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does"

Allen Ginsberg, Poet

"When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep"

Patti Smith, Musician

"Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose"

Walter Savage Landor, Poet

"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does"

Allen Ginsberg, Poet

"I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator"

Allen Ginsberg, Poet

"Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it"

Russell Baker, Journalist

"I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world"

Russell Baker, Journalist

"Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it"

Russell Baker, Journalist

"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words"

Vladimir Nabokov, Novelist

"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry"

Paul Muldoon, Poet

"The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives"

Paul Muldoon, Poet

"When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose"

Jerry B. Jenkins, Novelist

"I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"A lot happens by accident in poetry"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before"

Audre Lorde, Poet

"I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

"And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so"

Norman MacCaig, Poet

Page 3 of 16