Poetry Quotes - page 3

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish. (William Blake)
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. View quote
Gustave Flaubert
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. View quote
Emily Dickinson
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild. View quote
Denis Diderot
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music. View quote
Denis Diderot
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. View quote
William Wordsworth
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. View quote
Vincent van Gogh
Superstition is poetry of life, so that it does not injure the poet to be superstitious. View quote
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. View quote
Novalis
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator. View quote
Allen Ginsberg
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. (Allen Ginsberg)
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets. View quote
Federico Fellini
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race. View quote
Johann Georg Hamann
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry. View quote
Edith Hamilton
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary. View quote
Walter Scott
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for. View quote
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. View quote
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
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)
Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country. It has no energy crisis, possessing a potential that will last as long as the country. Its power is equal to that of any country in the world. View quote
Richard Eberhart
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all. View quote
Manuel Puig
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem. View quote
Mark Strand
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. View quote
Mark Strand