Poetry Quotes

"Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life."

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

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

"Poetry: the best words in the best order."

"Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented."

"The poet doesn't invent. He listens."

"Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment."

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

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

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."

"Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure."

"'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know."

"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry."

"Dancing is the poetry of the foot."

"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness."

"I love romantic poetry."

"When I get depressed, I try to get something for the terrible sadness that comes over me and create something in terms of poetry."

"A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression."

"Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth."

"Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!"

"I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever."

"No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it."

"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."

"Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince."

"Superstition is the poetry of life."

"Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!"

"Eloquence is the poetry of prose."

"Why should poetry have to make sense?"

"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."

"Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one."

"In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English."

"Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief - everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies."

"You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry."

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

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

"Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that."

"The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry."

"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."

"I went through a phase of reading lots of Urdu poetry, thanks to the great transliterated versions that have become available."

"Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness."

"Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me."

"I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive."

"I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right."

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

"Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love."

"Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel."

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

"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem."