Quotations About Poetry I

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.



Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks


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


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


Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. ~William Hazlitt


Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T.S. Eliot



Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~Edmund Burke


Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. ~William Blissett



Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree. He doesn't eat much and doesn't read much, but listens well and is a most gracious host. ~Astrid Alauda




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


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


I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. ~Edith Södergran



Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. ~Robinson Jeffers




Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen


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


Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand


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


To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson


There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves


Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost

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


Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats