Poetry Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Colette

Edgar Allan Poe

John Ashbery

John Betjeman

Georges Braque

Basil Bunting

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Poetry does not necessarily have to be beautiful to stick in the depths of our memory...

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not — they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Edgar Allan Poe

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

Jacques Derrida

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

Isaac Rosenberg

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Norman O. Brown

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.

The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the exhilaration is incommunicable but 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.

The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.

George Edward Woodberry

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

Eugenio Montale

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords — philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Anna Brownell Jameson

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
'My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. There will come with the greater love of science greater love to one another. Living more nearly to Nature is living farther from the world and from its follies, but nearer to the world's people; it is to be of them, with them, and for them, and especially for their improvement. We cannot see how impartially Nature gives of her riches to all, without loving all, and helping all; and if we cannot learn through Nature's laws the certainty of spiritual truths, we can at least learn to promote spiritual growth while we are together, and live in a trusting hope of a greater growth in the future.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor — those great tools of thought — and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever. You can go not only into the future, but into that wonderful place called "other", which is simply another universe, another planet, another species.

Theodore Sturgeon

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth!
How do we use feeling?
How do we use truth! However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.

Muriel Rukeyser

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned into advertising copy.

Louis Kronenberger

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite!