Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Poetry.
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
Don Marquis
Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
Compay Segundo
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.
Randall Jarrell
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Robert Morgan
I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.
Stevie Smith
The cliche is dead poetry.
Gerald Brenan
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
Carl Sandburg
But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
Peter Davison
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
Sally Kirkland
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
Paul Valery
I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
J. Milton Hayes
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
William Wordsworth, from Preface
A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.
Robert Frost
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
All the same, we ought to point out that if the kinds of poetry and representation which are designed merely to give pleasure can come up with a rational argument for their inclusion in a well-governed community, we'd be delighted -- short of compromising the truth as we see it, which wouldn't be right -- to bring them back from exile: after all, we know from our own experience all about their spell. I mean haven't ever fallen under the spell of poetry, Glaucon, especially when the spectacle is provided by Homer?
Plato
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot
No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.
Thomas Harrison
I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.
