Top 620 Poetry Quotes

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
Michael Tippett
America’s liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.
Ben Shapiro
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
The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.
George Oppen
A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
Ivan Turgenev
I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah’s ‘Black Reign’ is the album that stands out the most.
Jason Reynolds
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
Robert Penn Warren
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Robert Morgan
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost
I don’t think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn’t. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.
James Tate
I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I’d be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.
Omari Hardwick
I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly – poetry, literature – this speculative attitude toward life.
Rafael Moneo
Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.
Robert Green Ingersoll
Most people can’t tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.
Thurston Moore
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
Seamus Heaney
The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to l

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
The job of the poet is to render the world – to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.
Mark Van Doren
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
Eugenio Montale
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Robert Morgan
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Robert Morgan
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
Philip Levine
I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.
Kamal Haasan
I’m pretty much all for poetry in public places – poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.
Billy Collins
From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Tobias Wolff
I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one’s done it this way.
Kenny Loggins
You just go where poetry is, whether it’s in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there’s live poetry or recordings.
Joy Harjo
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
Eugenio Montale
Poetry is not a genre in harmony with the modern world; its innermost nature is hostile or indifferent to the dogmas of modern times, progress and the cult of the future.
Octavio Paz
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
Omari Hardwick
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry, it’s just obtuse to them. It’s hard to relate to.
Jewel
Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called ‘real world’ of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets.
Tom Hodgkinson
God is the perfect poet.
Robert Browning
As for political poetry, as it’s usually defined, it seems there’s very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.
Sylvia Plath
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
Anthony Hope
When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn’t worth reading.
Billy Collins
In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.
Lawrence Summers
Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
William Hazlitt
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I’ve ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don’t say I can write everything well.
Jess Walter
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
When you’re 15, you’re not really talking about the vicissitudes of fate and failed love and poetry and swordfighting – not a lot is necessarily touching on your own personal experience.
Rory Kinnear
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
Frederick William Robertson
I don’t think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.
Robert Morgan
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.
Basil Bunting
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
Lionel Trilling
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one’s own understanding of how to understand the world.
Peter Davison
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
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
Thom Gunn
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
David Josiah Brewer
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
John Cage
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Adrienne Rich
Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.
Philip Schultz
The tradition of Russian literature is also an eastern tradition of learning poetry and prose by heart.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo
Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
Robert Adamson
Love is the poetry of the senses.
Honore de Balzac
Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
Yusef Komunyakaa
I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.
Annie Lennox
Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it’s like a jackhammer.
Bette Midler
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Mark Strand
Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it’s no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it’s really just about the money, the perceived prestige.
George Murray