Top 620 Poetry Quotes

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
Norman MacCaig
We’re all just animals. That’s all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That’s where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Elvis Costello
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
Mahmoud Darwish
I really disliked Philadelphia society – really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.
Martha Nussbaum
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
Sally Kirkland
But for me, being an editor I’ve been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
Peter Davison
In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry is composing for the breath.
Peter Davison
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.
June Jordan
When you’re looking that far out, you’re giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn’t need translation. It’s like poetry, it touches you.
Story Musgrave
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
I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzi

I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Making poetry with a camera – that’s the essence of what I do.
Denis Villeneuve
Poetry is the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.
Octavio Paz
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they’re more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven’t the least idea of where poetry is going.
James Laughlin
Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
Russell Baker
When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.
Terrance Hayes
The oration of poetry, I consider to be its own art form and tradition.
Amanda Gorman
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Havelock Ellis
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.
Pink
Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.
Rita Dove
When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.
C. K. Williams
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
James Fenton
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.
Kenneth Koch
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Herbert Spencer
I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn’t some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that’s happening around us.
Rita Dove
I’m happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Billy Collins
Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
Jean Cocteau
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
Eugenio Montale
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
Anne Stevenson
The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.
Erik Satie
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories – these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
F. Sionil Jose
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance… poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound
That’s a wonderful change that’s taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
A. R. Ammons
A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.
Justin Cartwright
Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.
James Schuyler
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.
Ani DiFranco
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
Alfred Nobel
In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.
Jonas Mekas

In conclusion, poetry is a testament to the infinite possibilities of language and the boundless depths of human expression. Through poetry, we connect with our emotions, navigate the complexities of life, and find solace in the power of words. May these poetry quotes inspire us to embrace the beauty of language, awaken our creativity, and seek the transformative power of poetic verse in our own lives. Let us celebrate the magic of poetry and allow its enchanting melodies to resonate within our hearts and souls.