poetry

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know. 22 quotes from Andre Gide

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it. 6 quotes from Norman MacCaig

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so. 6 more quotes from Norman MacCaig

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy. 14 more quotes from Muhammad Iqbal

Eloquence is the poetry of prose. 5 quotes from William C. Bryant

For me, prose walks, poetry dances. 12 quotes from James Broughton

How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry. 3 other quotes from Allen Tate

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. 2 views from James Schuyler

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry. 2 other thoughts from Isaac Rosenberg

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry. 6 other thoughts from Norman MacCaig

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it. 5 more views from Marianne Moore

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now. 6 wisdom & wit from Norman MacCaig

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy. 14 quotes from Muhammad Iqbal

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets. 12 other sayings from James Broughton

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images. 12 quotes from James Broughton

Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way. 2 more sayings from Isaac Rosenberg

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. 78 quotes from Voltaire

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases. 8 quotes from William Shenstone

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is. 12 wisdom & wit from James Broughton

Poetry is all nouns and verbs. 5 more views from Marianne Moore

Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique. 2 more quotes from Karl Shapiro

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. 5 more quotes from Marianne Moore

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. 4 quotes from Jacques Maritain

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy. 12 views from James Broughton

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers. 12 quotes from James Broughton

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself. 2 views from James Schuyler

When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous. 6 sayings from Norman MacCaig

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry. 14 other quotes from Muhammad Iqbal

Wine is bottled poetry. 39 other wisdom & wit from Robert Louis Stevenson

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. 30 other thoughts from Gustave Flaubert

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry. 3 quotes from Muriel Rukeyser

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. 3 more quotes from Alfred de Musset

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. 30 wisdom & wit from Gustave Flaubert

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does. 3 quotes from Charles Olson

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all. 11 quotes from Manuel Puig

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. 26 wisdom & wit from Emily Dickinson

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. 26 wisdom & wit from Emily Dickinson

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel. 14 wisdom & wit from Jim Morrison

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger. 3 quotes from Muriel Rukeyser

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you. 14 other sayings from Jim Morrison

Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. 8 more quotes from Matthew Arnold

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. 30 other wisdom & wit from Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. 8 quotes from Matthew Arnold

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle. 5 other quotes from Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. 2 other sayings from Thomas Gray

The novel is born of disillusionment the poem, of despair. 5 quotes from Jose Bergamin

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness. 3 more quotes from Muriel Rukeyser

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. 3 quotes from Louis Kronenberger

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry. 26 more quotes from Emily Dickinson

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble. 3 sayings from Charles Olson

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century. 7 quotes from Jose Marti

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress. 36 more quotes from Lord Byron

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense. 2 views from Thomas Harrison

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. 26 quotes from E. M. Forster

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. 19 other quotes from Edgar Allan Poe

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry. 10 views from John Donne

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty. 19 wisdom & wit from Edgar Allan Poe

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. 24 other quotes from Carl Sandburg

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it. 3 more quotes from Lascelles Abercrombie

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets. 4 more quotes from Federico Fellini

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern. 2 other wisdom & wit from Thomas Harrison

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. 17 thoughts from Plutarch

Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go. 2 thoughts from Laura Riding

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. 56 views from Khalil Gibran

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir. 4 sayings from George Farquhar

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. 24 views from Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. 24 more wisdom & wit from Carl Sandburg

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry. 3 more thoughts from Michael Tippett

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate. 2 thoughts from John Denham

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. 37 quotes from Edmund Burke

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. 24 views from Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. 19 other quotes from Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. 24 quotes from Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. 3 quotes from Lascelles Abercrombie

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates. 6 quotes from Franz Grillparzer

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose. 9 other wisdom & wit from Walter Savage Landor

Prose talks and poetry sings. 6 quotes from Franz Grillparzer

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends. 30 views from Virginia Woolf

The crown of literature is poetry. 29 views from W. Somerset Maugham

The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. 3 other quotes from Lascelles Abercrombie

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch. 26 more quotes from E. M. Forster

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry. 2 more sayings from Laura Riding

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough. 24 quotes from Carl Sandburg

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on. 24 other wisdom & wit from Carl Sandburg

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. 19 views from Edgar Allan Poe

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven! 36 more wisdom & wit from Lord Byron

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry. 30 thoughts from Virginia Woolf

A lot happens by accident in poetry. 9 wisdom & wit from Howard Nemerov

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. 21 wisdom & wit from W. H. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. 21 other views from W. H. Auden

Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too. 4 quotes from George Murray

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. 9 quotes from Howard Nemerov

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity. 3 views from James Dickey

I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation. 2 more views from Anthony Hope

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. 9 quotes from Howard Nemerov

It is written on the arched sky it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature it is that which uplifts the spirit within us. 45 other views from John Ruskin

Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart. 2 thoughts from Andres Segovia

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen. 31 sayings from Gertrude Stein

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. 11 quotes from James Joyce

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter. 73 sayings from Victor Hugo

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. 5 more quotes from Theodore Sturgeon

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry. 3 more wisdom & wit from James Dickey

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. 45 thoughts from John Ruskin

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly. 4 views from Frederick William Robertson

The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming. 4 thoughts from George Murray

Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction. 4 other wisdom & wit from George Murray

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry. 16 thoughts from Havelock Ellis

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. 45 other quotes from John Ruskin

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. 50 quotes from Robert Frost

But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity. 2 more sayings from Alfred de Vigny

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime. 6 sayings from Phyllis McGinley

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. 2 thoughts from Wilfred Owen

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both. 2 sayings from Wilfred Owen

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. 50 other quotes from Robert Frost

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. 50 other quotes from Robert Frost

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. 50 sayings from Robert Frost

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. 50 sayings from Robert Frost

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. 23 more quotes from Vincent Van Gogh

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. 105 other thoughts from Albert Einstein

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears. 5 more views from Octavio Paz

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words. 3 sayings from Stephane Mallarme

Always be a poet, even in prose. 25 quotes from Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. 25 views from Charles Baudelaire

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. 2 wisdom & wit from Robert Penn Warren

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms. 3 quotes from John Millington Synge

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. 9 sayings from Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. 38 views from William Hazlitt

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. 2 quotes from James Branch Cabell

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. 21 quotes from William Wordsworth

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere. 2 other wisdom & wit from James Martineau

The cliche is dead poetry. 3 quotes from Gerald Brenan

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. 13 quotes from John Muir

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it. 2 other sayings from Robert Penn Warren

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. 20 more wisdom & wit from Herbert Spencer

Why should poetry have to make sense? 11 thoughts from Charlie Chaplin

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. 52 quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty. 5 wisdom & wit from Dennis Potter

God is the perfect poet. 22 quotes from Robert Browning

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up. 2 thoughts from Keith Haring

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry. 2 more quotes from Randall Jarrell

Love is the poetry of the senses. 53 other wisdom & wit from Honore de Balzac

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. 10 more quotes from Novalis

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved. 4 other quotes from Jose Ortega y Gasset

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production. 8 other quotes from Joseph Brodsky

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. 2 more wisdom & wit from Georges Braque

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. 52 thoughts from Gilbert K. Chesterton

To have great poets, there must be great audiences. 30 more views from Walt Whitman

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. 14 quotes from Joseph Joubert

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you. 14 other quotes from Joseph Joubert

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry. 5 wisdom & wit from John Drinkwater

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts. 5 quotes from John Drinkwater

I read poetry to save time. 53 wisdom & wit from Marilyn Monroe

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator. 3 sayings from Allen Ginsberg

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. 14 more sayings from Thomas Hardy

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry. 5 quotes from John Drinkwater

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse. 5 more views from John Drinkwater

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have. 2 more wisdom & wit from John Masefield

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. 14 wisdom & wit from Thomas Hardy

Poetry is life distilled. 2 sayings from Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language. 5 views from Gaston Bachelard

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way. 5 more views from John Drinkwater

Poetry lies its way to the truth. 6 other views from John Ciardi

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams. 5 sayings from Gaston Bachelard

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. 3 more quotes from Allen Ginsberg

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. 28 other sayings from William Butler Yeats

You don't have to suffer to be a poet adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. 6 quotes from John Ciardi

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. 24 more sayings from Jean Cocteau

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. 8 quotes from Raymond Chandler

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. 24 thoughts from Jean Cocteau

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. 9 other sayings from George Sand

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. 117 more views from Henry David Thoreau

If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money. 4 quotes from Robert Graves

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words. 2 other quotes from Anatole Broyard

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for. 24 quotes from Jean Cocteau

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind. 18 sayings from Don Marquis

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. 18 more wisdom & wit from Don Marquis

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. 24 quotes from Jean Cocteau

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. 24 sayings from Jean Cocteau

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. 6 quotes from Lionel Trilling

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories. 3 other quotes from Margaret Walker

There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired. 14 more quotes from Edward Young

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. 4 quotes from Robert Graves

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. 18 wisdom & wit from Don Marquis

Dancing is the poetry of the foot. 17 other views from John Dryden

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. 2 quotes from Paul Dirac

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country. 5 more thoughts from Will Cuppy

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation. 2 quotes from Knut Hamsun

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. 19 more sayings from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. 19 sayings from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry. 2 other quotes from Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. 2 other thoughts from Johann Georg Hamann

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. 19 sayings from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. 2 quotes from Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. 19 sayings from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. 7 thoughts from Jorge Luis Borges

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. 19 quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Teach you children poetry it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary. 15 more quotes from Walter Scott

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking. 26 other thoughts from Jean de la Bruyere

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. 5 other wisdom & wit from Maria Montessori

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left. 5 quotes from Robert Staughton Lynd

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming. 14 thoughts from F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. 23 wisdom & wit from T. S. Eliot

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry. 4 quotes from John Cage

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. 60 more wisdom & wit from H. L. Mencken

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. 63 more quotes from Samuel Johnson

Poetry is the deification of reality. 2 other wisdom & wit from Edith Sitwell

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. 23 views from T. S. Eliot

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. 4 more wisdom & wit from John Cage

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. 16 quotes from Paul Valery

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. 100 more quotes from Oscar Wilde

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. 16 quotes from Wallace Stevens

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. 100 other quotes from Oscar Wilde

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. 8 quotes from Ezra Pound

Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. 16 more quotes from Wallace Stevens

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies. 6 other quotes from Eugenio Montale

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me. 6 thoughts from Eugenio Montale

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well. 16 other sayings from Paul Valery

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all. 16 wisdom & wit from Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry. 16 views from Wallace Stevens

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music. 8 quotes from Ezra Pound

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. 6 views from Eugenio Montale

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. 2 wisdom & wit from Robert Fitzgerald

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready. 6 quotes from Eugenio Montale

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild. 16 quotes from Denis Diderot

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. 19 more thoughts from John Keats

Poetry: the best words in the best order. 24 views from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one. 6 other sayings from Eugenio Montale

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life. 7 wisdom & wit from Jean Giraudoux

The poetry of the earth is never dead. 19 quotes from John Keats

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know. 6 quotes from Eugenio Montale