Poetry Quotes

A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.

A poem is no place for an idea.

My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

It's easier to quote poets than to read them.

It was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

Most people ignore most poetry
because
most poetry ignores most people.

The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.

A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.

All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.