Poetry Quotes And Sayings

by allinspiration.com

Here is a collection of poetry quotes and sayings from various authors, celebrities, famous persons, and other sources compiled by allinspiration.com for you to read and enjoy.

“Even when poetry has a meaning. as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out…. Perfect sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.”
– A. E. Housman

“People are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
– Abraham Lincoln

“Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.”
– Alfred de Musset

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”
– Allen Tate

“Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.”
– Allen Tate

“Therefore” is a word the poet must not know. 
– André Gide

“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

“Most painters have painted themselves.  So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously.  Some have done nothing else.”
– Augustus William Hare

“Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature.”
– Augustus William Hare

“Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.”
– Augustus William Hare

“Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.”
– Carl Sandburg

“Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.”
– Carl Sandburg

“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

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
– Carl Sandburg

“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
– Charles Baudelaire

“In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.”
– Charles Baudelaire

“Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.”
– Charles Simic

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
– Christopher Fry

“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.”
– Christopher Fry

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

“Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.”
– Dan Rather

“Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rhythm bound in poets’ minds, defying time and age.”
– Dave Beard

“I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.”
– Derek Walcott

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” 
– Don Marquis

“Most poems are never finished,” (I was defensive).  He sighed: “No, most poems are never started.” 
– Dr. SunWolf

“A poem is true if it hangs together.  Information points to something else.  A poem points to nothing but itself.”
– E.M. Forster

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
– Edgar Allan Poe

“I don’t create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.”
– Edith Södergran

“A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.”
– Edmond de Goncourt

“He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.”
– Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“I was never less alone than when by myself.”
– Edward Gibbon

“Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.”
– Eli Khamarov

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
– Ernest Hemingway

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public”
– George Orwell

“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

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