Poetry Quotes
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I'll publish, right or wrong: Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
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More Poetry Quotes
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.
Peggy Noonan— What I Saw at the Revolution (1990)
Something of glass about her, of dead water, Chills and holds us, Far more fatal than painted flesh or the lodestone of live hair, This despair of crystal brilliance.
louis macneice— 1935 Poems,'Circe'.
My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring; And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze; For above and around me the wild wind is roaring, Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
anne brontë— 1846 'Line Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day', in Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
Poetry is a rich, full-blooded whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbers the leaf, the duet of two nightingales, the sweet pea, that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.
wallace stevens— Quoted in Life, 13 June 1960.
There's something in a flying horse, There's something in a huge balloon.
william wordsworth— William Wordsworth, Peter Bell. Prologue, Stanza 1.
[I] do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck—and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay—and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road.
yevgeny yevtushenko— New York Times (2 February 1986)
I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence this may look like affectation but it is my real opinion it is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake
lord byron— Letter to Annabella Milbanke (29 November 1813).
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
james branch cabell— James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919).
Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes... whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber... they're listening to poetry.
maya angelou
We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows
robert frost— 1942 'The Secret Sits', complete poem.
Coffee, (which makes the politician wise, And see through all things with his half-shut eyes), Sent up in vapours to the baron's brain, New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.
Alexander Pope— The Rape of the Lock, Canto III, line 117.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Aristotle— Poetics (335) 1451b 6.
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— George Sand, The Haunted Pool (1890) ch. 2.
In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column: In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ovidian Elegiac Metre.
Still may syllables jar with time, Still may reason war with rhyme, * Resting never!
Ben Jonson— Ben Jonson, Underwoods, Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme.
Jewels five-words-long, That on the stretch'd forefinger of all Time Sparkle for ever.
Alfred Tennyson— The Princess (1847), Part II, line 355.
My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, so I said I wanted to read poetry with her.
guy Johnson
Listen to the musn'ts, child, listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me. Anything can happen, child, anything can be.
Shel Silverstein— Listen to the Mustn'ts
They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt; And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
ralph waldo emerson— Brahma, st. 3
Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.… all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds.
Giannina Braschi— In Yo-Yo Boing! (1998)
I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.
— Lucille Clifton, rebroadcast after her death on Bill Moyers Journal, 26 February 2010 (transcript, video).
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot— Dante (1929).
The person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism.
— Statement at a poetry reading at Princeton University (26 October 1937), published in Collected Poems, Prose & Plays (1995).
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.
thomas hardy— Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy ed. Michael Millgate (1984) p. 302.
I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty .
— Often quoted as "Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words".
The elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost (c. 1595-6), Act IV, scene 2, line 126.
The true poem is the poet's mind.
ralph waldo emerson— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Of History
These are the gloomy comparisons of a disturbed imagination; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration.
junius— Letter No, VII. To Sir W. Draper
Wisdom married to immortal verse.
william wordsworth— William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Book VII
