Quotes about poetry-and-poets

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

— Don Marquis

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

— Don Marquis

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

— Philip Massinger

Poets are born, not paid.

— Addison Mizner

It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

— Christopher Morley

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

— Wes ''Scoop'' Nisker

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

— Sylvia Plath

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

— Plato

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

— Edgar Allan Poe

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

— Jules Renard

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

— Frederick W. Robertson

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

— Joseph Roux

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

— Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky.

— Carl Sandburg

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

— Carl Sandburg

A poet is born not made.

— Saying

The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.

— L. Schefer

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

— Sir Walter Scott

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

— Dame Edith Sitwell

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

— Captain J. G. Stedman

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

— Wallace Stevens

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

— Sir William Temple

Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it.

— Henry David Thoreau

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

— Henry David Thoreau

War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.

— Mark Twain

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you --like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist --or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

— Source Unknown

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to those who need it.

— Source Unknown

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

— Paul Valery

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

— Voltaire

Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

— Voltaire

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

— Voltaire

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

— Elwyn Brooks White

A poet can survive anything but a misprint.

— Oscar Wilde

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

— William Carlos Williams

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

— Virginia Woolf

It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Great poets are great copy editors.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Why poetry, you ask? Because of life, I answer.

— Dejan Stojanovic

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

— Dejan Stojanovic

I have fallen in love with you my angel. I sought nothing of you but only to see that dazzling smile of yours once more. I wish nothing more of you but only hope that one day you shall love me the way I love you. I regret nothing for that the only time spent with you are memories and memories are meant not to be forgotten.

— Mahmoud El Hallab