Famous Poetry Quotes - Famous Quotes about Poetry
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
- E. M. Forster
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A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
- Edmond de Goncourt
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A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
- Wilfred Owen
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All a poet can do today is warn.
- Wilfred Owen
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Any healthy man can go without food for two days, but not without poetry.
- Charles Baudelaire
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Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.
- Archibald MacLeish
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Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
- A. E. Housman
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For nothing keeps a poet
In his high singing mood
Like unappeasable hunger
For unattainable food.
- Joyce Kilmer
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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
- T. S. Eliot
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I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.
- A. E. Housman
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I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
- Russell Baker
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I have nothing to say. I am saying it, and that is poetry.
- John Cage
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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.
- Paul Dirac
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Let us go and talk with the poets.
- Joaquin Miller
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No bad man can be a good poet.
- Boris Pasternak
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Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.
- Dudley Moore
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Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
- Helen Hayes
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Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now.
- Richard Eberhart
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Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
- Novalis
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Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.
- Richard Eberhart
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Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
- Allen Ginsberg
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Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
- Thomas Gray
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Poets are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
- Archibald MacLeish
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Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
- Robert Penn Warren
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Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.
- John Masefield
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Sir, I admit your gen'ral rule
that every poet is a fool:
but you yourself may serve to show it
that every fool is not a poet.
- Alexander Pope
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Sometimes only poetry can say it. I think there's just this deeper language, and a way of putting your world back together again and breaking through barriers.
- Laura Nyro
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The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
- Allen Ginsberg
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The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have; else they will never have better.
- Harriet Monroe
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The phone rings and I curse.
Literary editor.
Seasonal verse.
- Wendy Cope
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The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.
- Stephane Mallarme
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There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- Poetry. All the rest is a lie -- except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. . .
- Stephane Mallarme
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
- John Cage
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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
- John Ashbery
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To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
- Walt Whitman
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Very nice, though there are dull stretches. (on another writer's two-line poem)
- Antoine de Rivarol
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When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
- Stephen Spender
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Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
- Antonin Artaud
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You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
- John Ciardi
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You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.
- Stephane Mallarme
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You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you.
- Joseph Joubert
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