Explore the meaning of poetry and the motivation of poets with these 50 special collection of evocative quotations...
2 "Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one." -- W. H. Auden
3 "Eloquence is the poetry of prose." -- William C. Bryant
4 "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." -- Emily Dickinson
5 "How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery." -- Elizabeth Drew
6 "She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me written by an Italian poet from the 13th century and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul from me to you." -- Bob Dylan
7 "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences." -- T S Eliot
8 "Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
9 "Only poetry inspires poetry." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
10 "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." -- Robert Frost
11 "The man is either mad, or he is making verses." -- Horace
12 "Good religious poetry . . . is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout." -- A. E. Housman
13 "I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer." -- Langston Hughes
14 "I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged . . . I had poems which were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out." -- Erica Jong
15 "As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry." -- June Jordan
16 "Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality." -- James Joyce
17 "Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity --it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." -- John Keats
18 "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
19 "I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it." -- Marianne Moore
20 "I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants." -- Howard Nemerov
21 "And he whose fustian's so sublimely bad/ It is not poetry, but prose run mad." -- Alexander Pope
22 "I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself." -- Carl Sandburg
23 "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." -- Percy Bysshe Shelley
24 "Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do." -- Stephen Spender
25 "I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this." -- George Steiner
26 "Everything is complicated; if that we not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore." -- Wallace Stevens
27 "Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech." -- Henry David Thoreau
28 "How do poems grow? They grow out of your life." -- Robert Penn Warren
29 "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." -- William Wordsworth
30 "A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote." -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
31 "A poet is someone who is astonished by everything." -- Anonymous
32 "Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry." -- Georges Brague
33 "The poet doesn't invent. He listens. " --Jean Cocteau
34 " 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
35 " Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." -- T. S. Eliot
36 "The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
37 " There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it." -- Gustave Flaubert
38 "A poem begins with a lump in the throat. " --Robert Frost
39 " Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement." -- Christopher Fry
40 " There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either." -- Robert Ranke Graves
41 " Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul." -- Henrik Ibsen
42 " When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." -- John F. Kennedy
43 "Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind." --Thomas Babington Macaulay
44 "The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. " --Richard Rosen
45 " Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know." -- Joseph Roux
46 "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. " --Percy Byshe Shelley
47 "Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. " --Charles Simic
48 "A poem is never finished, only abandoned. " --Paul Valéry
49 " Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls." -- Voltaire
50 "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge." -- William Wordsworth
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