Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Poetry.
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
Erik Satie
Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Allen Ginsberg
That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
A. R. Ammons
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent Van Gogh
Superstition is the poetry of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.
Rick Springfield
I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
Erica Jong
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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.
Tom Schulman, Professor Keating
May I be permitted to add a few words with regard to the poetry? Then I will speak to those who are judges thereof, with all freedom and unreserve. To these I may say, with-out offence, 1. In these hymns there is no doggerel ; no botches ; nothing put in to patch up the rhyme ; no feeble expletives. 2. Here is nothing turgid or bombast, on the one hand, or low and creeping, on the other. 3. here are no cant expressions ; no words without meaning. Those who impute this to us, know not what they say. We talk common sense, both in prose and verse, and use no words but in a fixed and determinate sense. 4. Here are, allow me to say, both the purity, the strength, and the elegance of the English language; and, at the same time, the utmost simplicity and plainness, suited to every capacity. Lastly, I desire men of taste to judge, (these are the only competent judges,) whether there be not in some of the following hymns the true spirit of poetry, such as cannot be acquired by art and labour, but must be the gift of nature. By labour, a man may become a tolerable imitator of Spenser, Shakspeare, or Milton ; and may heap together pretty compound epithets, as pale-eyed, meek-eyed, and the like ; but unless he be born a poet, he will never attain the genuine spirit of poetry.
John Wesley, preface to the 1780
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Robert Fitzgerald
Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.
C. Fitzhugh
From THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
Rainer Maria Rilke
This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity
Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
Thornton Wilder, attributed
All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
Lord Alfred Douglas, Collected P
