Quotations and Poems

» “A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.”
– Diane Ackerman

»  ”Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.”
– Aristotle

»  ”Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”
– Aristotle

»  ”Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.”
– Antonin Artaud

»  ”There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.”
– John Ashbery

»  ”Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.”
– W. H. Auden

»  ”As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.”
– W. H. Auden

»  ”I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a ‘’suspension of belief.” A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.”
– W. H. Auden

»  ”Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.”
– W. H. Auden

»  ”The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.”
– Francis Bacon

»  ”I’ve read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.”
– John Barrymore

»  ”Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry.”
– Charles Baudelaire

»  ”Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.”
– Charles Baudelaire

»  ”Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.”
– Charles Baudelaire

»  ”The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.”
– Saul Bellow

»  ”Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.”
– Maxwell Bodenheim

»  ”In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they’re not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they’re doing is simply talking back to the language itself –as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony –those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it’s something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a ”read,” commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.”
– Joseph Brodsky

»  ”If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society’s own equivalent of oblivion.”
– Joseph Brodsky

»  ”Poetry is life distilled.”
– Gwendolyn Brooks

»  ”I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence –this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”Poetry should only occupy the idle.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”As to ”Don Juan,” confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?”
– Lord Byron

»  ”An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”
– Raymond Chandler

»  ”Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human mature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.”
– William Ellery Channing

»  ”Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth — the true poet is very near the oracle.”
– Edwin Hubbel Chapin

»  ”Little do such men know the toil, the pains, the daily, nightly racking of the brains, to range the thoughts, the matter to digest, to cull fit phrases, and reject the rest.”
– Charles Churchill

»  ”Poetry is indispensable –if I only knew what for.”
– Jean Cocteau

»  ”Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.”
– Jean Cocteau

»  ”I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; –poetry = the best words in the best order.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

»  ”That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

»  ”To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.”
– Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

»  ”It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara Falls) that my ”poems” are competing.”
– E.E. Edward

»  ”If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
– Emily Dickinson

»  ”Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
– Emily Dickinson

»  ”Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”
– Denis Diderot

»  ”The job of the poet is to render the world — to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.”
– Mark Van Doren

»  ”We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.”
– Elizabeth Drew

»  ”Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.”
– Andrea Dworkin

»  ”She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.”
– Bob Dylan

»  ”A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.”
– Max Eastman

»  ”I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
– Umberto Eco

»  ”Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: –in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.”
– George Eliot

»  ”I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.”
– T. S. Eliot

»  ”It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry –That is a life.”
– T. S. Eliot

»  ”We must believe that ”emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not ”recollected” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ”tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.”
– T. S. Eliot

»  ”When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.”
– T. S. Eliot

»  ”Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
– T. S. Eliot

»  ”It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”Only poetry inspires poetry.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.””
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

»  ”Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”
– Paul Engle

»  ”Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.”
– George Farquhar

»  ”The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”
– James Fenton

»  ”Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.”
– Robert Fitzgerald

»  ”Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.”
– C. Fitzhugh

»  ”All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.”
– Gustave Flaubert

»  ”We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
– John Fowles

»  ”Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
– Robert Frost

»  ”A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
– Robert Frost

»  ”I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”
– Robert Frost

»  ”Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”
– Robert Frost

»  ”Poetry is what is lost in translation.”
– Robert Frost

»  ”A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
– Robert Frost

»  ”Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement… says heaven and earth in one word… speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.”
– Christopher Fry

»  ”Between religion’s ”this is” and poetry’s ”but suppose this is,” there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.”
– Northrop Frye

»  ”I don’t know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.”
– Zona Gale

»  ”I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks… or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don’t bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.”
– Allen Ginsberg

»  ”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

»  ”If there’s no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”
– Robert Graves

»  ”The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.”
– David Hare

»  ”Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.”
– David Hare

»  ”Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
– William Hazlitt

»  ”The essence of poetry is will and passion.”
– William Hazlitt

»  ”The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.”
– William Hazlitt

»  ”Every old poem is sacred.”
– Horace

»  ”No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.”
– Horace

»  ”No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.”
– Horace

»  ”Poets wish to profit or to please.”
– Horace

»  ”The man is either mad, or he is making verses.”
– Horace

»  ”A person born with an instinct for poverty.”
– Elbert Hubbard

»  ”A good poet’s made as well as born.”
– Ben Johnson

»  ”You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.”
– Joseph Joubert

»  ”Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”
– James Joyce

»  ”In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”
– Franz Kafka

»  ”Inside every man there is a poet who died young.”
– Stephan Kanfer

»  ”Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”
– John Keats

»  ”Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity –it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
– John Keats

»  ”When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
– John F. Kennedy

»  ”Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.”
– Alphonse De Lamartine

»  ”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

»  ”The eye is the notebook of the poet.”
– James Russell Lowell

»  ”Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”
– Thomas B. Macaulay

»  ”The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.”
– Stephane Mallarme

»  ”There is only beauty — and it has only one perfect expression — poetry. All the rest is a lie –except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.”
– Stephane Mallarme

»  ”Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
– Don Marquis

»  ”Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.”
– Don Marquis

»  ”Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
– Philip Massinger

»  ”Poets are born, not paid.”
– Addison Mizner

»  ”It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.”
– Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

»  ”The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”
– Christopher Morley

»  ”Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.”
– Wes ”Scoop” Nisker

»  ”The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”
– Sylvia Plath

»  ”Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.”
– Plato

»  ”With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.”
– Edgar Allan Poe

»  ”A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.”
– Jules Renard

»  ”Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

»  ”The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.”
– Frederick W. Robertson

»  ”Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.”
– Joseph Roux

»  ”Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.”
– Carl Sandburg

»  ”Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
– Carl Sandburg

»  ”Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”
– Carl Sandburg

»  ”I have written some poetry that I don’t understand myself.”
– Carl Sandburg

»  ”A poet is born not made.”
– Saying

»  ”The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.”
– L. Schefer

»  ”Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.”
– Sir Walter Scott

»  ”Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

»  ”Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

»  ”The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.”
– Dame Edith Sitwell

»  ”Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.”
– Captain J. G. Stedman

»  ”The poet is the priest of the invisible.”
– Wallace Stevens

»  ”No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.”
– Sir William Temple

»  ”Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.”
– Henry David Thoreau

»  ”Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.”
– Henry David Thoreau

»  ”War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.”
– Mark Twain

»  ”Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but to those who need it.”
– Source Unknown

»  ”Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you –like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist –or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
– Source Unknown

»  ”A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
– Paul Valery

»  ”This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]“
– Voltaire

»  ”Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.”
– Voltaire

»  ”It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.”
– Voltaire

»  ”A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.”
– E(lwyn) B(rooks) White

»  ”A poet can survive anything but a misprint.”
– Oscar Wilde

»  ”But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.”
– William Carlos Williams

»  ”The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.”
– Virginia Woolf