The 51 Greatest Quotes About Poetry !

1. Language is fossil poetry. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. All poetry is misrepresentation. - Jeremy Bentham
3. Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. - Joseph Roux
4. Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life. - Matthew Arnold
5. Poetry fettered fetters the human race. - William Blake
6. A poem begins with a lump in the throat. - Robert Frost
7. Poetry : the best words in the best order. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
8. Immature poets imitate ; mature poets steal. - T. S. Eliot
9. We love the things we love for what they are. - Robert Frost
10. You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. - Mario Cuomo
11. At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. - Plato
12. Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. - James Branch Cabell
13. To break the pentameter, that was the first heave. - Ezra Pound
14. You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. - John Adams
15. Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. - Edgar Allen Poe
16. Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. - Robert Frost
17. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. - Philip Larkin
18. I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. - A. E. Housman
19. There is a pleasure in poetic pains / which only poets know. - William Cowper
20. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. - G.K. Chesterton
21. Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild. - Denis Diderot
22. Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters. - e. e. cummings
23. Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. - Dennis Gabor
24. Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. - Kahlil Gibran
25. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. - Carl Sandburg
26. Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. - Adrian Mitchell
27. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. - William Hazlitt
28. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. - Leonard Cohen
29. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. - Emily Dickinson
30. A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. - Robert Graves
31. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. - Robert Frost
32. Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. - Stephen Spender
33. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. - Percy Bysshe Shelley
34. I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry. - S.T.Coleridge
35. I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. - Kenneth Rexroth
36. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. - Leonardo da Vinci
37. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. - William Wordsworth
38. The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, and then you listen for the reverberation. - James Fenton
39. 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
40. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. - Percy Bysshe Shelley
41. Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. - Don Marquis
42. Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing. - W.S. Merwin
43. Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock; but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones. - Samuel Johnson
44. Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world. - Miguel de Cervantes
45. A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. - Salman Rushdie
46. You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore. - Bob Dylan
47. 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
48. Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. - Plato
49. Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes. - Henry David Thoreau
50. I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem. - Lucille Clifton
51. Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. - Dylan Thomas