Poetry Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Traveling is as much a passion as love, poetry, or ambition.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; … Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, … as have also long since our best English tragedies, as... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.

Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.

A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.

Margaret Atwood

Poetry and the arts can't exist in America. Mere exposure to the arts does nothing for a mentality which is incorrigibly dialectical. The vital tensions and nutritive action of ideogram remain inaccessible to this state of mind.

Marshall McLuhan

The meanings of poetry take their growth through the interaction of the images and the music of the poem. The music is not the rhythm, which is a representation of life, alone. The music involves the interplay of the sounds of words, the length of the sequences, the keeping and breaking of rhythms, and the repetition and variation of syllables unrhymed and rhymed. It also involves the play of ideas and images.

Muriel Rukeyser

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Perhaps the author cited is one of those, who, shunning the practice of the world, have taught the world to shun return! whose poetry is too finely spun, whose philosophy is too and mystified for popular demand: perhaps we have experienced feeling which Mr. Wordsworth alludes to, in a poem worthy of simplicity and loneliness of the sentiment—"Often have I sighed to measure By myself a lonely pleasure; Sighed to think I read a book Only read perhaps by me!"

Samuel Laman Blanchard

As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

Muriel Rukeyser

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Jorge Luis Borges

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

Romantic poetry … recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

José Ortega y Gasset

Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

As I grew older the poetic surround becomes more important. I realize that the 'poetic attention' was more important to me than poetry was. The 'poetic attention' being a kind of longing without the desire to posess.

I think poetry should be alive. You should be able to dance it.

Benjamin Zephaniah

Poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

Gaston Bachelard

What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines
of poetry?

Lorine Niedecker

A ship-building, a ship-sailing community has an unconscious poetry ever underlying its existence.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.

Ursula K. Le Guin