Poetry Quotes

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Dylan Thomas

All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.

Sonia Sanchez

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

Groucho Marx

The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.

Leopold Schefer

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

George Oppen

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

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

Harold Bloom

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

Matthea Harvey

Language is to inner space as light is to material space

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T S Eliot

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Rita Dove

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

W H Auden

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.

Sylvia Plath

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

Margaret Atwood

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

W H Auden

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

Samuel Beckett

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

Julian Barnes

A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.

Salman Rushdie

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Khalil Gibran

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

Robert Frost

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

William Wordsworth

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere.

Thoreau

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression

as ‘dim land of peace’. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.

Ezra Pound

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

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Don Marquis

What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you’re a poet. But there isn’t one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn’t any formula for it.

Erica Jong

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

Edgar Allan Poe

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

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Robert Graves

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

Poetry gives rhythm to silence, light to darkness. In poetry we find the magic of metaphor, compactness of expression, use of the five senses, and simplicity or complexity of meaning in a few lines.

Phyllis Klein

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T S Eliot

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Leonardo da Vinci

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Goethe

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, a limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry, but to achieve clarity.

George Oppen

It does not matter whether one paints a picture, writes a poem, or carves a statue, simplicity is the mark of a master-hand. Don't run away with the idea that it is easy to cook simply. It requires a long apprenticeship.

Elsie de Wolfe

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Emile Zola

The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps…so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Dylan Thomas

It is by faith that poetry as well as devotion soars above this dull earth; that imagination breaks through the clouds, breathes a purer air, and lives in a softer light.

H Giles

Flowers are the terrestrial stars that bring down heaven to earth, and carry up our thoughts from earth to heaven; the poetry of the Creator, written in beauty and fragrance.

Chatfield

Listmaking is an easy way to turn chaos into order or confusion into poetry.

Ilene Segalove

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Steven Wright

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as a tree.

Joyce Kilmer

The poet’s aim is the wonder.

Marino

Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores us to forgotten paradises.

Dame Edith Sitwell

The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on. Emily Dickinson

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

Poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Shakespeare

Prose = words in their best order. Poetry = the best words in the best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

Jeremy Bentham

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

T S Eliot