Poetry Quotes

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth,From earth to heaven.

There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art,... one satisfies hunger, the other gratifies the palate.

My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.

When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

The true poet is called to take in the splendor of the world and for that reason will always be inclined to praise rather than tofind fault.

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

Nor sequent centuries could hitOrbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE's wit.The men who lived with him becamePoets, for the air was fame.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

I know very well what Goethe meant when he said that he never had a chagrin but he made a poem out of it. I have altogether too much patience of this kind.

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.

I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had,But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

Three Songs 1 Mountain. I whip my quick horse and don't dismount and look back in wonder. The sky is three feet away. 2 Mountain. The sea collapses and the river boils. Innumerable horses race insanely into the peak of battle. 3 Mountain. Peaks pierce the green sky, unblunted. The sky would fall but for the columns of mountains.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.

When clever people ask me whereI get a poem, I despair.

My love for him was so exquisitely pure that if we all were capable of giving and receiving such a beautiful gift the world would be a far more brilliant place; I think we'd all be poets.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

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.

Before now poetry has taken noticeOf wars, and what are wars but politicsTransformed from chronic to acute and bloody?

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man foretold

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.

The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize

A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden"A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

Why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse?

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

Many people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor.

The poet's habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common influences should delight him.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.

Test of the poet is knowledge of love,For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;Never was poet, of late or of yore,Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.

I have made a very rude translation of the Seven against Thebes, and Pindar too I have looked at, and wish he was better worth translating. I believe even the best things are not equal to their fame. Perhaps it would be better to translate fame itself,--or is not that what the poets themselves do? However, I have not done with Pindar yet.

That perhaps is your task--to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet's way--that is what we look to you to do now.

Our best history is still poetry.

I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

one pale woman all alone,The daylight kissing her wan hair,Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,With lips of flame and heart of stone.

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.