Poetry Quotes

Welcome to Worry Quotes. Here you will find poetry quotations and famous quotes about poetry.

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

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valéry

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

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God is the perfect poet. ~Robert Browning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~Stephen Mallarme

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay

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, John Mistletoe

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis

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

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

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg

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

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

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

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

Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks

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

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato, Ion

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

Poetry is not always words. ~Terri Guillemets

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

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape. ~J. Patrick Lewis, www.jpatricklewis.com

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~Edmund Burke

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

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. ~Augustus William Hare

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

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

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

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. ~Thomas Gray

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. ~Author Unknown

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. ~André Gide

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're not quite sure what it means but the words are so beautiful you know it must be profound. ~Terri Guillemets