Poetry: A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost

Poetry: A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valery

Poetry: A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. ~E.M. Forster

Poetry: A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own. ~Austin O'Malley

Poetry: A poet acquires a kind of spiritual jurisdiction over the places he has sojourned in and the hills he has haunted. ~W.H. Gresswell

Poetry: A poet builds his nest in the springtime tree of wild reverie, and ends up staying the year. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A poet can survive anything but a misprint. ~Oscar Wilde

Poetry: A poet cannot stop writing poems — an ink-stained soul compels his obsession. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A poet carrying a thought from his mind into expression is like a child bearing a bucket brimming with water from the well to the house,-part of the contents is spilled. ~Austin O'Malley

Poetry: A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~E.B. White

Poetry: A poet is a flaming phoenix — burnt up with each and every poem. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. ~Randall Jarrell

Poetry: A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. ~Edmond de Goncourt

Poetry: A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry: A poet is a painter of the soul. ~Isaac D'Israeli

Poetry: A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Søren Kierkegaard

Poetry: A poet is inmate, and warden, to his own mind. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A poet is too impatient for prose. He needs an expressway to his emotions. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ~W.H. Auden

Poetry: A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~Wallace Stevens

Poetry: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. ~Rene Char

Poetry: A poet rips his flesh on the thorn of language and bleeds raw ink onto paper petals. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A poet swallows life and exhales painted words. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ~Yevgeny Yentushenko

Poetry: A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~Salman Rushdie

Poetry: A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers

Poetry: A sold poem loses half its meaning. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: A translation of a poem is like a plastercast of a statue or a photograph of a painting; and the better the translation the poorer the original poem. ~Austin O'Malley

Poetry: A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. ~Jean Cocteau

Poetry: A vein of Poetry exists in the hearts of all men; no man is made altogether of Poetry. We are all poets when we a poem as well. ~Thomas Carlyle

Poetry: All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. ~Oscar Wilde

Poetry: All genuine poets are fervid politicians.... Are there no politics in Hamlet? Is not Macbeth, is not the drama of Wallenstein, a sublime political treatise? Napoleon was a great poet, when, pointing to the pyramids, he said to his army, 'Forty centuries look down upon us!'... All true and lasting poetry is rooted in the business of life. ~Ebenezer Elliott

Poetry: Always be a poet, even in prose. ~Charles Baudelaire

Poetry: And take back ill-polished stanzas to the anvil. ~Horace

Poetry: Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. ~Charles Baudelaire

Poetry: Any method is good that produces a good poem. ~Helen Smith Bevington

Poetry: Beauty is the true meaning of poetry. But after all nothing is said; and a thinker, a sensitive mind, will extract more from the simple word itself than can be embodied in a hundred varnished phrases. ~T.C. Henley

Poetry: Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rhythmbound in poets' minds, defying time and age. ~David J. Beard (1947-2016), tweet, 2009 June 12th

Poetry: Can [poets] do anything but gradually ascend towards the source, towards the primitive ideas that bind together man-the family and society-with a different cement to that of science and of law? Long will it be ere poetry can solder together the fragments of its falling sceptre; but these fragments are beautiful, and in the present day he who succeeds in picking up one of them will be a king among us. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. ~Jean Cocteau

Poetry: Compression of poetry is so great I often explode. Out of the house to walk off a poem. ~William Corbett

Poetry: Does not poetry itself lose somewhat in detaching itself so entirely from the reality whence it proceeds, and fixing itself thus solitary in aërial heights? ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

Poetry: Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. ~Alfred de Musset

Poetry: Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out.... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure. ~A.E. Housman

Poetry: Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue! ~Jean Cocteau

Poetry: Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility.... to give an immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink.... Poetry begins... with a savage beating a drum in a jungle... hyperbolically one might say that the poet is than other human beings.... Poetry... may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate... ~T.S. Eliot

Poetry: Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry: Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. ~Gustave Flaubert

Poetry: For not only is the poet is a translator of the inner life of man, with its wonder world of thoughts and feelings-its unspeakable love and sorrow, its hopes and aspirations, temptations and lonely wrestlings, darings and doubts, grim passions and gentle affections, its smiles and tears-which, in their changeful lights or gloomy grandeur, play out the great drama of the human heart, but he also translates into his poetry and reflects for us the very spirit of his time. ~Gerald Massey

Poetry: Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T.S. Eliot

Poetry: God is the perfect poet. ~Robert Browning

Poetry: Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. ~Oscar Wilde

Poetry: He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. ~George Sand

Poetry: He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Poetry: How happy it made her! And what beautiful things these poets always thought of and said! ~S.J. Adair Fitz-Gerald

Poetry: I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don't have to write anymore. ~Tukaram

Poetry: I am no dealer in metaphysics, and will not attempt to define poetry by its rules. Poetry lies hid within the inner core of man's thoughts and feelings and affections. It pervades the glorious universe in which the Almighty has placed him. It shines forth from the starry heavens, and from the deep blue vault of the summer sky. It lurks amid the green leaves of the groves, and gushes forth in the "wood notes wild" of their sweet songsters. It sparkles and plays in the flickering eddies of the stream... ~J. M'Dermaid

Poetry: I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. ~Edith Sodergran

Poetry: I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. ~Pablo Neruda

Poetry: I hate French poetry. What measured glitter! ~Israel Zangwill

Poetry: I have supped on poetry. ~Octave Mirbeau

Poetry: I love writing poetry because poetry can be anything you want it to be — just like daydreaming. There are no rules except those in your heart and your own pen. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: I sew my life together with the glittering thread of poetry. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: I was condemned to poetry. I was a dreamer: nose in a book, head in the clouds. ~Fred Chappell

Poetry: I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. ~Robert Frost, 1935

Poetry: I'm quite hungry. Feed me poems, please. ~Dr. SunWolf, 2014 tweet

Poetry: I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry: If a poet writes in gibberish, his soul yet understands. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy

Poetry: If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy

Poetry: If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Poetry: If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry. ~Stephen Spender, about Rainer Maria Rilke

Poetry: If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. ~Author Unknown

Poetry: If you got to talking to most cowboys, they'd admit they write 'em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry. ~Ross Knox

Poetry: If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. ~Derek Walcott

Poetry: If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry

Poetry: In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed. ~Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Preface to , ©1890

Poetry: In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand must spring from the commonplace.... All that remains for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Is blood then so much more eloquent than ink? Does a pistol-shot ring farther than a poem? ~A Californian, anonymous open letter to poet Vera Fitch, 1910 October 29th, in , San Francisco, 1910 November 12th

Poetry: It has been truly said that though the printer's ink should dry up, ten thousand melodious tongues would preserve the songs of [Robert] Burns to remote generations. ~William Cunningham

Poetry: It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. ~W.H. Auden

Poetry: It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. ~Charles Baudelaire

Poetry: It is vain for the sober man to knock at poesy's door. ~Plato

Poetry: It sometimes seems to me

Poetry: It's easier to quote poets than to read them. ~Allison Barrows

Poetry: Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. ~Robert Frost

Poetry: Lyres are placid in the hands of poets; but the true lyre is the poet himself. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Many lyric poets have sensed a parallel between the rhythmic pulse of their blood and language in a poem, but it is of the essence of Kunitz' art that the threshold that transforms blood to ink is not tongue or mouth, but wound... ~Gregory Orr

Poetry: Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart. ~Thomas Hill

Poetry: Mirrors seemed to have taken up a hell of a lot of time in his life. He thought of one now-the mirror in the bathroom, years ago, back home. When he was a kid-fourteen, fifteen-writing a poem every night before he went to sleep, starting and finishing it at one sitting even though it might be two or three o'clock, that bathroom mirror had come to mean more to him than his own bed. Nights when he had finished a poem, what could have been more natural, more necessary and urgent, than to go and look at himself to see if he had changed? Here at this desk, this night, one of life's important moments had occurred. Humbly, almost unaware, certainly innocent, he had sat there and been the instrument by which a poem was transmitted to paper. ~Charles R. Jackson

Poetry: Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Poetry: My chief aim is to make a poem. You make it for yourself firstly, and then if other people want to join in then there we are. ~R.S. Thomas

Poetry: My poem may be a weed, but it has sprung, unforced, out of existing things. It may not suit the circulating libraries for adult babies; but it is the earnest product of experience, a retrospect of the past, and an evidence of the present-a sign of the times-a symptom, terrible, or otherwise, which our state doctors will do well to observe with the profoundest shake of the head... ~Ebenezer Elliott

Poetry: My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me. ~Countee Cullen

Poetry: No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. ~S.T. Coleridge

Poetry: No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers. ~Horace

Poetry: Oh, of course I know that 'ate' ain't good etiquette in that place... It should be 'eat.' But 'eat' don't rhyme, an' 'ate' does. So I'm goin' to use it. An' I can, anyhow. It's poem license; an' that 'll let you do anything. ~Eleanor H. Porter

Poetry: One must forgive a large self-consciousness to a great poet. We cannot deny a certain Godlikeness to one who creates men from his brain. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach

Poetry: Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich. ~William Bolitho

Poetry: Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Poetry: Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry: POETRY.-The language in which the Book of Nature is written-they who can translate it are called poets. ~"A Chapter of Definitions,"

Poetry: Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if anything which gives so much pleasure can be called unsoundness.... Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry, but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are just, but the premises are false. After the first suppositions have been made, everything out to be consistent; but those first suppositions require a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

Poetry: Poems: words with smooth edges. ~Author Unknown

Poetry: Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appall them if it did. ~Christopher Morley

Poetry: Poetry dyes your soul with a melody half yours and half the poet's. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis

Poetry: Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~Khalil Gibran

Poetry: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley

Poetry: Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry: Poetry is a perfectly reasonable means of overcoming chaos. ~I.A. Richards

Poetry: Poetry is a work of imagination wrought into form by art. It arises out of the necessity of expression, and the impossibility of adequate expression of any of the deeper feelings in direct terms. Hence the soul clothes those feelings in symbolic and sensuous imagery, in order to them. Poetry is not imagination, but imagination shaped. Not feeling, but feeling expressed symbolically; the formless suggested indirectly through form. Hence the form is an essential element of poetry. And, the form in which poetical feeling expresses itself is infinitely varied. ~Frederick W. Robertson, paraphrased from a lecture delivered before the Members of the Mechanics' Institution, February 1852

Poetry: Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. ~William Hazlitt

Poetry: Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry: Poetry is an ethereal garden crying rhyming tears of roses. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry is creative; to be a poet is to remake the universe. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Poetry is emotion put into measure. ~Thomas Hardy

Poetry: Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. ~James Tate

Poetry: Poetry is frosted fire. ~J. Patrick Lewis

Poetry: Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen

Poetry: Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ~Rita Dove

Poetry: Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry: Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. ~James Branch Cabell

Poetry: Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato

Poetry: Poetry is never abandoned, it is only remixed. ~James Schwartz

Poetry: Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can [f*@%] off. ~Philip Larkin

Poetry: Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. ~Robinson Jeffers

Poetry: Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. ~T.S. Eliot

Poetry: Poetry is not always words. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. ~Allen Ginsberg

Poetry: Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ~Paul Engle

Poetry: Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns. ~J. Patrick Lewis

Poetry: Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ~Dennis Gabor

Poetry: Poetry is prose, bent out of shape. ~J. Patrick Lewis

Poetry: Poetry is reverie on paper. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~Edmund Burke

Poetry: Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason. ~Samuel Johnson

Poetry: Poetry is the dancing skeleton of bare-bones prose. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry is the energy of the soul made ink. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. ~Maxwell Bodenheim

Poetry: Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry: Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Poetry: Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry

Poetry: Poetry is the overflowing of the soul. ~Henry T. Tuckerman

Poetry: Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. ~Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry: Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry: Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry: Poetry is the tunnel at the end of the light. ~J. Patrick Lewis

Poetry: Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Poetry: Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. ~Author Unknown

Poetry: Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost

Poetry: Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost

Poetry: Poetry mends a broken arrow then shoots us in the heart with it. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry should be a sacred thing.... It should be, in fine, the historian of human nature in its fullest possible perfection, and the painter of all those lines and touches, in earth and heaven, which nothing, but taste, can see and feel. It should give to its forms the expression of angels, and throw over its pictures the hues of immortality. There can be but one extravagance in poetry; it is, to clothe feeble conceptions in mighty language. ~James G. Percival, Preface to

Poetry: Poetry should never hurt. It may stab you with poetic pangs of melancholy but shouldn't ever hurt as life does. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats

Poetry: Poetry slips a silk dress over naked prose. ~James Lendall Basford

Poetry: Poetry treks through our souls and tells us in rhyme of the adventure. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always keeps its essential object in the purest light of truth. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Poetry: Poetry was music. Poetry was not the thing said, but continual evocation of delicious suggestions of meaning. Poetry was an unconscious crystallization of glittering images upon the bare twig of metre. Poetry, at the nadir of this search for its essence, became the formless babble and vomit of the poet's subconscious mind. ~Alec Derwent Hope

Poetry: Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. ~William Blissett

Poetry: Poetry,-the language of the Imagination and the Passions,-the oldest and most beauteous offspring of Literature. ~Frederick Hinde

Poetry: Poetry! poetry! the emptiest of all words, or the most significant,-the most frivolous of all things, or the most important. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Poetry... simple, sensuous and passionate. ~John Milton

Poetry: Poets are candid. They tell us not under an abstract, but an individual form, in which reality breathes, what humanity thinks in the most secret recesses of its mind. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~Robert Frost

Poetry: Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. ~Allen Tate

Poetry: Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov

Poetry: Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry: Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently. ~Jean Cocteau

Poetry: Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. ~G.K. Chesterton [Not true! To read the poetry of cheese

Poetry: Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. ~James Russell Lowell

Poetry: Poets smoke nature and beauty and angst and exhale swirling plumes of poetry. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poets swing too high, until the chain kinks and snaps mid-air. The fall is poetry. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Poets touch forcibly and truly that invisible lyre which echoes in unison in all human souls. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. ~Plato

Poetry: Poets' Pens, pluckt from Archangels' wings. ~John Davies of Hereford

Poetry: Pressure cranks and presses Life, squeezing out essence of self, aromatic with bittersweet memories, pungent adversities, and the honey-musk of desire - the vapors hover over our inkpots, and if we pick up the feather it becomes our poetry. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Prose is just poetry that can't stop talking. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. ~Don Marquis

Poetry: Rhyme is the music of the poetic dance. ~James Lendall Basford

Poetry: Salts of lemon never fails to remove ink spots. A great many would-be poets should buy the salts by the barrel and pickle their effusions in it. ~Mary Wilson Little

Poetry: Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. ~Joseph Roux

Poetry: So we dreamt a dream. And there seemed to arise the Poet. And he seemed to say, There is a man who sits and thinks,-thinks deeply. And his fancy draws up forms and facts from The Beautiful. And a pen writes them down; and it is Poetry, and he is a Poet. ~"Architecture,"

Poetry: Sometimes I'm not quite sure what it means, but the words are so beautiful I know it must be profound. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Sorry if these lines are irregular in length and jolty in meter. ~J.F. Bowman

Poetry: The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads to madness. ~Christopher Morley

Poetry: The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. ~W. Somerset Maugham

Poetry: The desert attracts the nomad, the ocean the sailor, the infinite the poet. ~Author Unknown

Poetry: The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. ~Aristotle

Poetry: The eye is the only note-book of the true poet. ~James Russell Lowell

Poetry: The flowery Path of Poetry but ill accords with the thorny Mazes of the Law; in the one I have wandered with rapture from Infancy, and I have endeavoured to grace the other with a simple but lasting Ornament-Integrity of Heart. ~Charles Snart

Poetry: The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it. ~Walter Benjamin

Poetry: The history of poetry is not exclusively and identically the history of works written in verse. Poetry dwells in prose writings as well; nay, is necessarily met with there, for poetry is less a class of writings than a breath unequally but generally diffused throughout literature: it is whatever raises us from the real to the ideal; whatever brings the prosaic in contact with our imaginations; whatever in any intellectual work echoes within the soul; it is the beauty of all beautiful things; it penetrates into spheres apparently most foreign to it; and what Voltaire has said of happiness may be equally said of poetry,-"She resembles fire, whose gentle heat secretly insinuates itself into all other elements, descends into rocks, rises in the cloud, reddens the coral in the sand of the seas, and lives in icicles that winters have hardened." ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: The Phœnix is also very much like an intelligent eagle, with gold and crimson plumage and an exceptionally waggish tail. It has the advantage of fifty orifices in his bill, through which he occasionally sings melodious songs to oblige the company. As he never appears to anyone more than once in five hundred years, sometimes, when he has the toothache for instance, only once in a thousand years—which is why he is called a rara avis—if you ever meet him at any time take particular notice of him. And if you can draw, if it is only the long bow, make a sketch of him. He lives chiefly on poets—which is why so many refer to him. He has been a good friend to the poets of all ages, as your cousin William will explain. If you have not got a cousin William, ask some one who has. ~S.J. Adair Fitz-Gerald

Poetry: The pleasure that poetry gives is that of imagining more than is written; the task is divided between the poet and his reader. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen

Poetry: The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life. ~Robert Penn Warren

Poetry: The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau

Poetry: The poet illuminates us by the flames in which his being passes away. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~Jean Cocteau

Poetry: The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." ~Robert Penn Warren

Poetry: The poet lights the light and fades away. But the light goes on and on. ~Emily Dickinson

Poetry: The poet needs to admire; he is in a merely human sense the high priest of the true, the beautiful, the grand. On whatever side he spreads his wings it is his mission to bear the universal homage to these worthy objects, or to some ideas of them. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: The poet sees and selects from on high and afar, and hardly inquires about what is near at hand. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more? ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Poetry: The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten. ~Edith Sitwell

Poetry: The poet who knows one human can portray a hundred. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach

Poetry: The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. ~Robert Frost

Poetry: The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ~Lionel Trilling

Poetry: The poetry of a given age teaches us less what it has, than what it wants and what it loves. It is a living medal, where the concavities in the die are transformed into convexities on the bronze or gold. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: The poetry of the earth is never dead. ~John Keats

Poetry: The secrets of Nature's beauty, as well as of her philosophy, must be interpreted, and poets are God's interpreters to make these secrets plain. ~J. M'Dermaid

Poetry: The smell of ink is intoxicating to me - others may have wine, but I have poetry. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: The sublimity of poetry, you see, lies in the fact that it does not take an educated person to understand it and to love it. On the contrary. The educated do not understand it, and generally they despise it, because they have too much pride. To love poetry it is enough to have a soul,-a little soul, naked, like a flower. Poets speak to the souls of the simple, of the sad, of the sick. And that is why they are eternal. Do you know that, when one has sensibility, one is always something of a poet? ~Octave Mirbeau

Poetry: The true poem is the poet's mind. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry: The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry: The ugly is in poetry only a passing shadow. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. ~Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry: The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. ~Dylan Thomas

Poetry: The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. ~Jean Cocteau

Poetry: Then, in what beauteous dress will Poetry oft clothe or decorate what in Prose is but too frequently flat and commonplace. ~Frederick Hinde

Poetry: There can be poetry in the writings of a few men; but it ought to be in the hearts and lives of all. ~John Sterline

Poetry: There is a chord of poetry, I do believe, in all men; petrified and frozen up, it may be in too many, by the cold realities of this work-a-day world; yet, at times, that "touch of nature which makes the whole world kin," shoots like the electric spark through their veins, and thaws and softens the hard and care-worn heart. ~J. M'Dermaid

Poetry: There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare

Poetry: There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. ~Gustave Flaubert

Poetry: There is often as much poetry between the lines of a poem as in those lines. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. ~John Cage

Poetry: There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves, 1962 interview on BBC-TV, based on a very similar statement he overheard around 1955

Poetry: Thus, Whitman set out to express in his poetry the soul of his Culture awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil. Not only is the Faustian soul self-conscious; it is eternally restless, constantly striving upward, and possesses a sense of spiritual infinity. All these characteristics are given expression in Whitman's poetry. ~, 1976

Poetry: To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession. He requires whatever it needs to be completely his own master. ~Robert Graves

Poetry: To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only. ~George Eliot

Poetry: To form the complete poet, neither heart only, nor head only, is sufficient; the complete poet must have a heart in his brain, or a brain in his heart. ~George Darley

Poetry: To have great poets there must be great audiences too. ~Walt Whitman

Poetry: True poets are those who have received from God, together with the gift of expression, the power of penetrating further than others into the things of the heart and the life. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse. ~Alexander Pope

Poetry: Walt Whitman … the remarkable American rhapsodist who has inoculated readers and writers with ethical and æsthetic rabies … the genuine energy and the occasional beauty of his feverish and convulsive style of writing … energetic emotion and sonorous expression … a style of rhetoric not always flatulent or inharmonious … exuberant incontinence … so pitiful a profession or ambition as that of a versifier … such were the flute-notes of Diogenes Devilsdung … James Macpherson could at least evoke shadows; Martin Tupper and Walt Whitman can only accumulate words … Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall; his Venus a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adulterated rum … the sources of inspiration which infuse into its chaotic jargon some passing or seeming notes of cosmic beauty, and diversify with something of occasional harmony the strident and barren discord of its jarring and erring atoms … but there is a thrilling and fiery force in his finest bursts of gusty rhetoric… ~Algernon Charles Swinburne, phrases extracted from "Whitmania," in

Poetry: Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. ~Charles Simic

Poetry: We ask the poet: 'What subject have you chosen' instead of: 'What subject has chosen you?' ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach

Poetry: We need the knowledge of the poet, the prophet and the deeper things of life... ~Joseph F. Daniels

Poetry: We should manage our Thoughts in composing a Poem, as Shepherds do their Flowers in making a Garland; first select the choicest, and then dispose them in the most proper Places, where they give a Lustre to each other... ~Alexander Pope

Poetry: What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? ~W.H. Auden

Poetry: Who can sleep when all the words of the poem aren't just exactly right‽ ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Who can tell the dancer from the dance? ~William Butler Yeats

Poetry: Winter surfaces in the poet by late summer, and spring is already in his inkpot with the first snow. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: Without philosophy there can be no true poetry: without it pretty verses may, indeed, be made; but in order to be really a poet it is essential to be also, up to a certain point, a philosopher. ~Alexandre Vinet

Poetry: You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas

Poetry: You can't write poetry on the computer. ~Quentin Tarantino

Poetry: You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~John Ciardi

Poetry: You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~Joseph Joubert

Poetry: Your prayer can be poetry, and poetry can be your prayer. ~Terri Guillemets

Poetry: He is not one of those. His verses are inferior to him and do not contain him. What he has written would give you a very false idea of his own person; his true poem is himself, and I do not know whether he will ever compose another. In the recesses of his soul he has a seraglio of beautiful ideas which he surrounds with a triple wall, and of which he is more jealous than was ever sultan of his odalisques. He only puts those into his verses which he does not care about or which have repulsed him; it is the door through which he drives them away, and the world has only those which he will keep no longer." ~Theophile Gautier