Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery
I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.
Carl Sandburg
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
God is the perfect poet.
Robert Browning
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
Robert Frost
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg
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
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
Rene Char
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Horace
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Kahlil Gibran
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Plutarch
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
Dennis Gabor
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
Eli Khamarov
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
Poetry is not always words.
Audrey Foris
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
Richard Rosen
Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
W.B. Yeats
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows.
Edmund Burke
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. Eliot
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
Marianne Moore
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music… and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: “Sing for us soon again;” that is as much as to say, “May new sufferings torment your soul.”
Soren Kierkegaard
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Robert Frost
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
The poem is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
Robert Penn Warren
Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.
William Blissett
Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse… the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Aristotle
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
Carl Sandburg
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Byshe Shelley
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
“Therefore” is a word the poet must not know.
Andr� Gide
Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.
James Branch Cabell
The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
W.B. Yeats
If the author had said “Let us put on appropriate galoshes,” there could, of course, have been no poem.
The Quotesjunction.com
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis
The smell of ink is intoxicating to me – others may have wine, but I have poetry.
Abbe Yeux-verdi
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.
William Bolitho
Who can tell the dancer from the dance?
William Butler Yeats
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
Sainte-Beuve
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
Stephen Mallarme
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.
Christopher Fry
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
Charles Simic
The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then
Roger McGough
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
Walt Whitman
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
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo
You can’t write poetry on the computer.
Quentin Tarantino
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
Emily Dickinson
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, “Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.”
Robert Penn Warren
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
Charles Simic
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset
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
God is the perfect poet.
Robert Browning
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
Rita Dove
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
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 who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.
Allen Tate
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Paul Engle
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.
Oscar Wilde
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert
Browsing the dim back corner
Of a musty antique shop
Opened an old book of poetry
Angels flew out from the pages
I caught the whiff of a soul
The ink seemed fresh as today
Was that voices whispering?
The tree of the paper still grows.
Pixie Foudre
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
John Ciardi
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
Joseph Roux
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot