Famous Poetry Quotes

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

Octavio Paz, Poet

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

Carl Sandburg, Poet

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

Eli Khamarov, Writer

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history"

Plato, Philosopher

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

Robert Frost, Poet

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

W. H. Auden, Poet

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

Plutarch, Philosopher

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

John Ruskin, Writer

"You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone"

John Ciardi, Dramatist

"Poetry: the best words in the best order"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet

"Always be a poet, even in prose"

Charles Baudelaire, Poet

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

Charles Baudelaire, Poet

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"

Paul Valery, Poet

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

E. M. Forster, Novelist

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

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

Howard Nemerov, Poet

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

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

Jean Cocteau, Director

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

Jean Cocteau, Director

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you"

Joseph Joubert, Writer

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry"

Muriel Rukeyser, Poet

"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"

A. E. Housman, Poet

"God is the perfect poet"

Robert Browning, Poet

"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

"I like poems that are little games"

Peter Davison, Actor

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood"

T. S. Eliot, Poet

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

Stephane Mallarme, 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

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

John Barton, Poet

"The moment of change is the only poem"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

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

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

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

Wallace Stevens, Poet

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash"

Leonard Cohen, Musician

"The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry"

Gustave Flaubert, 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

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