Poetry Quotes

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. (Socrates)
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you. View quote
Jim Morrison
Poetry is what is lost in translation. View quote
Robert Frost
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. View quote
John Ashbery
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel. View quote
Jim Morrison
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. View quote
Stephen Spender
Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. View quote
Leonard Cohen
Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. View quote
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life. (Herbert Spencer)
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. View quote
Robert Frost
I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it. View quote
John Cage
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. View quote
G. K. Chesterton
Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall. View quote
Ani DiFranco
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. View quote
Matthew Arnold
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. View quote
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out ... and perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. View quote
A. E. Housman
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. View quote
Adrian Mitchell
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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these. View quote
T. S. Eliot
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 the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite! (Paul Dirac)
Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry. View quote
Havelock Ellis
Superstition is the poetry of life. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. View quote
Leonardo da Vinci