Poetry Quotes

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No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know.

Henry David Thoreau

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.

Michel de Montaigne

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

Jean-Paul Sartre

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Vincent van Gogh

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

G. K. Chesterton

We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

G. K. Chesterton

Poetry and imagination begin life. A child will fall on its knees on the gravel walk at the sight of a pink hawthorn in full flower, when it is by itself, to praise God for it.

Florence Nightingale

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Mincing poetry:
'Tis like the forc'd gait of a shuffling nag.

William Shakespeare

Tell me", he wanted to say, "everything in the whole world" - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation—he is always f—gg—g his imagination.—I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.

Of keats

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.

So poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history, for while poetry is concerned with universal truth, history treats of particular facts…The particular facts of the historian are what, say, Alcibiades did, or what happened to him.

We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the 'supreme position', 'a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.'

The good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgement, it ravishes and overwhelms it.

Michel de Montaigne

Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. There is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.

Henry David Thoreau

Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry.

For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is constantly ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.