Poetry Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.

Boris Pasternak

In perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism.

Philippe Starck

Q: Why is America the land of the overrated child and the underrated adult? Q: How can children grow up in a world in which adults idolize youthfulness? Q: What happens when the ad makers taker over all the popular myths and poetry?

Marshall McLuhan

What is poetry?…The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.

Dean Young (poet)

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

The media themselves are the avant-garde of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting, music and poetry, it's the media themselves.

Marshall McLuhan

All noblest things are religious,— not temples and martyrdoms only, but the best books, pictures, poetry, statues, and music.

William Mountford

In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.

Muse of poetry, come to his aid, I thought. Could the man produce one more metaphor of husbandry? He seemed to be trying. "Green wood," I suggested, but even he sensed that there was something unfortunate about a metaphor for a king in which you dry out your royalty before you set fire to it.

Megan Whalen Turner

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

Vita Sackville-West

Poetry is a kind of attentiveness that permits one both the organized adventure of the nomad and the armchair security of the bank teller, a way of dabbling without being a dilettante.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

They [the visitors in his studio, praising his work] see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my method and that is all there is to it.

Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there — the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.

What is this poetry? A mortal mind
Made visible; a caged bird?
Nay more: it is a spiritleft behind
Nailed by the piercing word.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values

Suppress music and poetry, and our world will become a piggery.

She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.

Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.

I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that "poetess" was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

Margaret Atwood