Top 620 Poetry Quotes

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind… The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
Laura Riding
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.
Boris Pasternak
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
Thomas Hardy
I like poems that are little games.
Peter Davison
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
Matthew Arnold
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet’s personality.
Mark Strand
Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life.
William Rose Benet
A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.
Lafcadio Hearn
Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
Karl Shapiro
But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
Peter Davison
I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
Jonathan Galassi
The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.
Mark Knopfler
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don’t by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
Robert W. Service
In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry.
Paul Heyse
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It’s hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
David Antin
I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
David Means
There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.
Rupi Kaur
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
James Broughton
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I start

I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
Kapil Sibal
I think I’m a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I’m not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn’t work and why.
Diane Wakoski
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I’m not kidding.
Harry Mathews
We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order – poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.
John Drinkwater
I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Jesmyn Ward
Poetry allies itself with beauty – a supreme union – but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment.
Saint-John Perse
What can a pencil do for all of us? Amazing things. It can write transcendent poetry, uplifting music, or life-changing equations; it can sketch the future, give life to untold beauty, and communicate the full-force of our love and aspirations.
Adam Braun
That’s all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction – I don’t think anyone could know how much it really means.
Chuck Berry
When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read – Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier – were rhyme poets. That’s what captured me.
Marv Levy
Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.
Jim Harrison
I think that it’s more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
Robert Morgan
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it’s the oil of life.
John Betjeman
There’s a reason poets often say, ‘Poetry saved my life,’ for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul’s suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
They need to learn poetry. They don’t need to learn about poetry. They don’t need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don’t need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.
Peter Davison
It’s always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
Carol Ann Duffy
The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western poetry.
Lafcadio Hearn
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
Daisaku Ikeda
There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.
Peter Davison
I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
Marguerite Young
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Horace
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I’m not saying I’ve got the answers, just a of questions that I don’t hear other artists asking.
Malcolm Wilson
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
Lucille Clifton
There are Behan experts in international universities, but we seem to have forgotten him here in Ireland. He was an extraordinarily gifted writer. His poetry alone is outstanding.
Adrian Dunbar
The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.
Mahmoud Darwish
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
Margaret Walker
One: whose shoulders do you stand on? And two: what do you stand for? These are two questions that I always begin my poetry workshops with students because at times, poetry can seem like this dead art form for old white men who just seem like they were born to be old, like, you know, Benjamin Button or something.
Amanda Gorman
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Seamus Heaney
I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not real

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.
Eminem
I’m a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn’t matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They’re the same if you reach the beauty.
Roberto Benigni
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
Paul Auster
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
Lascelles Abercrombie
There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.
Phil Ochs
I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.
Jamila Woods
Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.
Floyd Skloot
There is a great deal of freshness and charm in ‘400 Blows.’ There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut’s camera looks at his beloved city.
Amitava Kumar
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
Christopher Fry
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
Antonin Artaud
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Carl Sandburg
Some people ask, ‘How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?’ I say, ‘My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.’
Mahmoud Darwish