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.

The freedom of poetic license.

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.

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.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

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.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

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.

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.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

The one man who should never attempt an explanation on poetry is its author. If the poem can be improved by its author�s explanations, it never should have been published.

Too many poets delude themselves by thinking that the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.

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

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

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

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have: Cincinnati sounds worse.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

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

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of Creation.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.