Poetry Quotes

Poetry

Invite to Poetry Quotes, the ultimate source for inspirational and also provocative quotes from the world's biggest poets. Here you will find a collection of timeless words of knowledge from some of one of the most distinguished poets in history. Whether you are trying to find a quote to motivate you, to make you laugh, or to make you believe, you will find it below. So, take a minute to explore our collection and discover the ideal quote to express your feelings.

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears"

Octavio Paz, Poet

Oscar Wilde

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

Oscar Wilde

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

Robert Frost

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness"

Robert Frost, Poet

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Poetry: the best words in the best order"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet

Plutarch

"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks"

Plutarch, Philosopher

Eli Khamarov

"Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition"

Eli Khamarov, Writer

Plato

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history"

Plato, Philosopher

Paul Valery

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"

Paul Valery, Poet

Charles Baudelaire

"Always be a poet, even in prose"

Charles Baudelaire, Poet

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry"

Muriel Rukeyser, Poet

"A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman"

Wallace Stevens, Poet

W. H. Auden

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language"

W. H. Auden, Poet

Charles Baudelaire

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry"

Charles Baudelaire, Poet

John Ruskin

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

John Ruskin, Writer

E. M. Forster

"A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself"

E. M. Forster, Novelist

"Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense"

Thomas Harrison

"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie"

Jean Cocteau, Director

"You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words"

Stephane Mallarme, Poet

"Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented"

Mark Strand, Poet

"We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words"

John Fowles, Novelist

George Sand

"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, Novelist

"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it"

James Schuyler, Poet

"Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket"

Charles Simic, Poet

"How do poems grow? They grow out of your life"

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote"

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Poet

"Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content"

Alfred de Musset, Writer

"You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble"

Charles Olson, Poet

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems"

John Barton, Poet

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem"

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses"

Jean Cocteau, Director

Adrienne Rich

"The moment of change is the only poem"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

"A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances"

Douglas Dunn, Poet

"A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

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