Top 620 Poetry Quotes

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
John Dryden
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
Diane Wakoski
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I’ve experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.
Tracy K. Smith
The cliche is dead poetry.
Gerald Brenan
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Eugenio Montale
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don’t have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson
Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.
Cheryl Hines
All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
Lord Alfred Douglas
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
Ishmael Reed
Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.
Tracy K. Smith
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 poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
Paul Dirac
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
Eugenio Montale
You don’t make a poem with ideas, but with words.
Stephane Mallarme
I write poetry on my iPhone. I’ve got about 100 poems on there.
Aaron Neville
It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can’t do in prose.
Peter Davison
I go to a lot of writers conferences and literary festivals that tend to be in college towns or cities, and I’m eager to see what happens if those same texts and those same questions move outside of those areas to smaller rural communities where there are surely people who read and love poetry.
Tracy K. Smith
I am absolutely convinced that my life was redeemed by poetry.
Felix Dennis
All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
Diane Wakoski
Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
Compay Segundo
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Robert Morgan
When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker
Ted Hughes is dead. That’s a fact, OK. Then there’s something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed – because that can’t be proven.
Derek Walcott
Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Walter Scott
Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.
Romesh Gunesekera
If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
Philippe Petit
I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
Langston Hughes
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry – the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
Lafcadio Hearn
He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.
John Clare
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
Thomas Gray
I go to the gym, do some martial arts, and I love poetry. I have a tattoo of my family crest, and another on my back that says ‘The Road Not Taken,’ which is a poem by Robert Frost.
Steven R. McQueen
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
Mahmoud Darwish
I’m no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it’s got everything: it’s a book of poetry, it’s a book of principle, it’s a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.
Tara Westover
My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.
Dylan Walsh
Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.
Ruskin Bond
There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
Eugenio Montale
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Comte de Lautreamont
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
Alfred de Musset
The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.
Peter Davison
An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.
John Barton
I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.
Henry Austin Dobson
Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.
Lisel Mueller
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
James Broughton
I’m about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don’t know if anybody wants to read it. It’s on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, ‘Okay, that’s another one.’ They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.
Marv Levy
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A. E. Housman
To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.
Brian Harris
I don’t think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can’t teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Robert Morgan
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
Edward Hirsch
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
Paul Muldoon
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
Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.
John Drinkwater
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
Albert Einstein
Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.
June Jordan
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
Howard Nemerov
I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an in

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don’t say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.
James Laughlin
But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker’s background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
Thomas Lynch
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage
I don’t think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don’t come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
Judy Collins
I can be upset by malice. Most critics are very poor poets. Poetry is a craft that takes a lot to appreciate, and there are some critics who have no ear for it. An irresponsible critic can do a lot of psychic damage, but eventually, they don’t affect your work.
Derek Walcott
Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
Sylvia Plath
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
Allen Tate