Poetry By Poets Quotes

• Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

  T. S. Eliot

  Communication, Writing, Poetry

  1929 Dante.

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

  Maya Angelou

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  FaceBook post by Maya Angelou from Dec 17, 2013

  108 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

  Carl Sandburg

  Writing, Animal, Air

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.317, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Mean, Expression

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Personality, Individual Talent

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

  21 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

  William Wordsworth

  Powerful, Poetry, Feelings

  Lyrical Ballads 2nd ed., preface (1802) See Dorothy Parker 24

  178 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

  David Carradine

  Inspirational, Life, Being Yourself

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  62 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poem begins with a lump in the throat

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Writing, Poetry

  Robert Frost, Mark Richardson (2007). “The Collected Prose of Robert Frost”, p.84, Harvard University Press

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

  Dennis Gabor

  Heart, Poetry, Poetic

  89 Copy quote

• Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Poetry, World

  A Defence of Poetry (written 1821) See Auden 22; Auden 39; Andrew Fletcher 1; Samuel Johnson 22; Twain 104

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Ideas, Reading Poetry, Skins

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

  48 Copy quote

  Show source

• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Writing, Reading Poetry

  The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny, Food, Sarcasm

  "Alarms And Discursions". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1910.

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

  Emily Dickinson

  Taken, Writing, Poetry

  Quoted in Martha Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924)

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

  Robert Frost

  Inspiration, Poetry, Delight

  Collected Poems preface (1939)

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

  Robin Williams

  Life, Carpe Diem, Dead Poets Society

  "Fictional character: John Keating". "Dead Poets Society", www.imdb.com. 1989.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Marriage, Sweet Love, Educational

  Sonnets from the Portuguese no. 43 (1850)

  115 Copy quote

  Show source

• Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

  Robert Frost

  Art, Philosophy, Writing

  Collected Poems (1939) "Figure a Poem Makes"

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Book, Son, Poetry

  33 Copy quote

• The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

  Christopher Morley

  Courage, Art, Doors

  Christopher Morley (1925). “Forty-four Essays by Christopher Morley”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

  Leonard Cohen

  Writing, Poetry, Ashes

  "My favourite word in songwriting history is 'that'" by Laura Barton, www.theguardian.com. May 31, 2007.

  39 Copy quote

  Show source
• 

  Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Motivational, Happiness

  "The Road Not Taken" l. 16 (1916)

  192 Copy quote

  Show source

• A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

  Salman Rushdie

  Courage, Sleep, Names

  The Satanic Verses pt. 2 (1988)

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Inspirational, Reading Poetry, Remembrance

  Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 238

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Poetry: the best words in the best order.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Writing, Vocabulary, Prose Poetry

  Table Talk 12 July 1827 (1835)

  25 Copy quote

  Show source