Famous Poetry Quotes

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

Eli Khamarov, Writer

"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

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"Poetry: the best words in the best order"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet

"The moment of change is the only poem"

Adrienne Rich, Poet

"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

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

John Ruskin, Writer

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

W. H. Auden, Poet

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

Gustave Flaubert, Novelist

"God is the perfect poet"

Robert Browning, Poet

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

Plutarch, Philosopher

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

E. M. Forster, Novelist

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned"

Paul Valery, Poet

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

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

John Ciardi, Dramatist

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood"

T. S. Eliot, Poet

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason"

Novalis, Poet

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

Joseph Joubert, Writer

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

Thomas Harrison

"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

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry"

Muriel Rukeyser, Poet

"Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance"

John Keats, Poet

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

Jean Cocteau, Director

"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

"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

"I like poems that are little games"

Peter Davison, Actor

"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

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

Stephane Mallarme, 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

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

Douglas Dunn, Poet

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