Quotes

morning: that first sapphire dome of glow.
-C K Williams

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

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
-Carl Sandburg

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
-Horace

Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme.
-John Fletcher

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder with a dash of the dictionary
-Kahlil Gibran

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
-Marianne Moore

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
-Novalis

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

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
-Plato

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.
-Robert Frost

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.".
-Robert Penn Warren

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
-Stephen Mallarme

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.
-Carl Sandburg

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
-Dylan Thomas

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
-Edgar Allan Poe

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
-Jean Cocteau

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
-John Fletcher

The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
-Lionel Trilling

The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
-Mark Van Doren

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
-Carl Sandburg

Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
-Paul Engle

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
-Randall Jarell

Poetry is truth dwelling in beauty.
-Robert Gilfillan

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
-Robert Frost

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
-Sylvia Plath

Of trees I (Krishna) am the fig.
-Bhagavad Gita

The courage of the Poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
-Christopher Morley

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
-E B White

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth-the true poet is very near the oracle.
-Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
-Jean Cocteau

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
-John Keats

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
-Marianne Moore

For me, poetry is an impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind.
-Maxwell Bodenheim

Poets aren't very usefulBecause they aren't consumeful or produceful..
-Ogden Nash

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
-Paul Valery

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-Rene Char

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
-Robert Graves

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

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
-Thomas Hardy

'Twas he that ranged the words at random flung, Pierced the fair pearls and them together strung.
-Bidpai

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
-Dennis Gabor

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
-Edgar Allan Poe

Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtle round your ruin'd shed?
-George Crabbe

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. 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 Fitzgerald Kennedy

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
-Joseph Joubert

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
-Carl Sandburg

Poetry is not a profession, it is a destiny.
-Mikhail Dudan

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
-Richard Rosen

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
-Robert Frost

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
-Samuel Mcchord Crothers

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
-Wallace Stevens