Quotes About Poets or Poetry?

Question

A poet is a brother speaking to a brother of a moment of their lives; a moment that has been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.

Answer 1

Quotes about Poetry  

  

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself

  William Hazlitt  

  

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

  Denis Diderot  

  

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

  Hannah Arendt  

  

Poetry

makes nothing happen.

It survives

in the valley of its saying.

  Maxine Kumin  

  

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



  Dennis Gabor

  

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

  Audre Lorde  

  

Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success.

  Babette Deutsch

    

  

    

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



    

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling . . .. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually—that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too— but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.  

  Muriel Rukeyser  

    

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.  

  G.K. Chesterton

    

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley  

    

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.



  W.S. Merwin  

    

Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen.

  Fleur Adcock  

    

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

  Robert Fitzgerald  

    

  

    

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement . . . says heaven and earth in one word . . . speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time.

  Christopher Fry  

    

Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.



  Mary Oliver  

    

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

  Robert Frost  

    

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

  Joseph Roux  

    

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  

    

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.

  Henry David Thoreau  

    

A poem begins with a lump in the throat.

  Robert Frost  

    

  

    

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  

    

Language is fossil poetry.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson



    

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe.

  Sir Joshua Reynolds  

    

I write poetry in order to live more fully.

  Judith Rodriguez

    

For women . . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

  Audre Lorde  

    

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

  Ishmael Reed  

    

  For poetry, he’s past his prime,

He takes an hour to find a rhyme;

His fire is out, his wit decayed,

His fancy sunk, his muse a jade.

I’d have him throw away his pen,

But there’s no talking to some men.  

  Jonathan Swift  

    

  

    

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson  

    

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

  Mario Cuomo  

    

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



  William Wordsworth  

    

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson  

    

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

  Muriel Rukeyser  

    

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy  

    

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.

  Peggy Noonan  

    

  

    

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

  Audre Lorde  

    

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

  Don Marquis  

    

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

  Henry David Thoreau  

    

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

  Muriel Rukeyser  

    

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.  

  Carl Sandburg  

    

  To see the Summer Sky

Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—

True Poems flee—

  

  Emily Dickinson  

    

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

  Adrian Mitchell  

    

  

    

  Breathe-in experience,

breathe-out poetry.

  

  Muriel Rukeyser  

    

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

  W. Somerset Maugham  

    

At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.



  Franz Grillparzer  

    

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

  Jean Coctea