Top 100 Poetry Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best poetry quotes ever written, picked out of the full poetry archive on QuoteForever. You will find Henry David Thoreau, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Ezra Pound and James Joyce among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

1

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.

2

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.

3

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

4

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

5

Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

6

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

7

Out of the attempt to harmonize our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry, - or, it may be, religion.

8

Poetry colors beings, objects, landscapes and sensations with a kind of new and particular light, which is in fact that of the poet's emotions.

9

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

10

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

11

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

12

Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.

13

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

14

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems

15

The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.

16

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

17

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

18

Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.

19

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

20

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age.

21

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

22

One merit of mathematics few will deny: it says more in fewer words than any other science. The formula, e^iπ = -1 expressed a world of thought, of truth, of poetry, and of the religious spirit "God eternally geometrizes."

23

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

24

Poetry saves what is human in this world going gaudy & insane. In exploring small truths, something larger might turn up, adding dimension, insight, vision, recognition to our lives. We just might be more complete, more aware after a poem.

25

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

26

One of the uses of poetry - one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances, ... or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night.

27

The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice.

28

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

29

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

30

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.

31

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

32

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

33

It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist.

34

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

35

To break the pentameter, that was the first heave

36

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

37

Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen.

38

Sentimental poetry differs from naive poetry in that it relates the real state at which the latter stops to ideas and applies ideas to that reality.

39

The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.

40

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

41

The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.

42

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

43

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

44

Poetry is to a painting what life is to man.

45

Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.

46

Poetry is a dangerous gift.

47

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

48

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

49

Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily

50

A bard whom there were none to praise, And very few to read.

51

Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

52

The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them.

53

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

54

As long as there is satire, the poet is, as it were, particeps criminis.

55

You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally, the stuttering, blunderingclod-hopper that I am. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag and exaggeration. Not that I do not stand on all that I have written,--but what am I to the truth I feebly utter?

56

We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.

57

The poet who walks by moonlight is conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence.

58

Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!

59

I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.

60

The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

61

Take what the old-church found in Mithra's tomb, candle and script and bell, take what the new-church spat upon and broke and shattered.

62

I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.

63

And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection.

64

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

65

Poetry is the tunnel at the end of the light.

66

The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say

67

Cold hearts don't bleed. Still they pray for eternity, never seeing tomorrow.

68

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

69

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

70

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.

71

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

72

The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense--the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.

73

I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.

74

the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extra-poetic ends, constitutes misuse.

75

... the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extrapoetic ends, constitutes misuse.... it may be poetry's stubborn quality of rockbottom, intrinsic uselessness whichconstitutes the guarantee of its integrity, and hence of its ultimate value to us.

76

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

77

Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.

78

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

79

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

80

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

81

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

82

You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy.

83

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

84

True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful.

85

The question "From where does the poet get it?" addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.

86

What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.

87

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

88

Some certified nut Will try to tell you it's poetry, (It's extraordinary, it makes a great deal of sense) But watch out or he'll start with some New notion or other.

89

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.

90

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses

91

I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important.

92

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

93

It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship.

94

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

95

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

96

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

97

Ornate rhetorick taught out of the rule of Plato.... To which poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.

98

Milton saw not, and Beethoven heard not, but the sense of beauty was upon them, and they fain must speak.

99

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

100

Poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own magic hermitage.

More Poetry quotes

This is the short list. The full poetry quotes collection holds every quote on the subject in the archive, and the picture quotes are ready to share as images.

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