Poetry is the art of using language in a structured and imaginative way to evoke emotions, convey ideas, or express experiences. It often employs rhythm, meter, and various literary devices such as metaphor, simile, and symbolism to create a specific aesthetic or emotional impact. Poetry can take many forms, including sonnets, haikus, free verse, and epics, each with its own rules or lack thereof. It has the power to capture the beauty of everyday life, explore profound emotions, and communicate complex thoughts in a condensed and impactful manner.
Poetry Quotes
1. “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”
— Plato
2. “Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”
— Khalil Gibran
3. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
— William Wordsworth
4. “Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.”
— Dylan Thomas
5. “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
6. “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”
— Robert Frost
7. “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”
— Carl Sandburg
8. “Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief—everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.”
— F. Sionil Jose
9. “Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti
10. “Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko
11. “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”
— June Jordan
12. “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
— Rita Dove
13. “Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.”
— Alice Walker
14. “Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.”
— Mary Oliver
15. “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”
— Julian Barnes
16. “Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”
— Sylvia Plath
17. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
— Emily Dickinson
18. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
— Emily Dickinson
19. “What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.”
— G. K. Chesterton
20. “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone’s knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
— Dylan Thomas
21. “I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.”
— Billy Collins
22. “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.”
— James Gates Percival
23. “You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.”
— Carol Ann Duffy
24. “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
— W. H. Auden
25. “Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.”
— Samuel Beckett
26. “A poet’s work… to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”
— Salman Rushdie
27. “Always be a poet, even in prose.”
— Charles Baudelaire
28. “Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
29. “Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.”
— Andre Gide
30. “I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.”
— Bob Dylan
31. “The poet is the priest of the invisible.”
— Wallace Stevens
32. “All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’”
— Sonia Sanchez
33. “You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.”
— Erica Jong
34. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”
— T. S. Eliot
35. “If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”
— Maya Angelou
36. “Nothing will work unless you do.”
— Maya Angelou
37. “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
— Maya Angelou
38. “Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.”
— Maya Angelou
39. “If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.”
— Maya Angelou
40. “You alone are enough, you have nothing to prove to anybody.”
— Maya Angelou
41. “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
— Robert Frost
42. “Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere.”
— Henry David Thoreau
43. “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”
— Oscar Wilde
44. “Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.”
— A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
45. “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
— W. H. Auden
46. “Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful, you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.”
— Mahmoud Darwish
47. “It was at that age, that poetry came in search of me.”
— Pablo Neruda
48. “One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
— Charles Baudelaire
49. “There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.”
— Emily Dickinson
50. “Don’t write love poems when you’re in love. Write them when you’re not in love.”
— Richard Hugo
51. “A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius.”
— George Edward Woodberry
52. “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
53. “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.”
— Plutarch
54. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
— T. S. Eliot
55. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
— Audre Lorde
56. “Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.”
— Allen Ginsberg
57. “Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.”
— Dennis Gabor
58. “Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”
— Thomas Gray
59. “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
— Robert Frost
60. “The crown of literature is poetry.”
— W. Somerset Maugham
61. “It is a test [that] genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
— T. S. Eliot
62. “Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.”
— Paul Engle
63. “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
64. “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
— Wilfred Owen
65. “Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.”
— Georges Braque
66. “I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.”
— Eugenio Montale
67. “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”
— Robert Grave
68. “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”
— Thomas Hardy
69. “A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer… He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.”
— E. B. White
70. “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
71. “Poetry – but what is poetry.”
— Wislawa Szymborska
72. “Oh, speak no ill of poetry, For ’tis a holy thing.”
― Lydia Huntley Sigourney
73. “It takes a lot of desperation, dissatisfaction and disillusion to write a few good poems.”
― Charles Buckowski
74. “And it was at that age … Poetry arrived in search of me.”
― Pablo Neruda
75. “The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.”
― Victor Hugo
76. “The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry.”
― Ernest Hemingway
77. “Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
― Virginia Woolf
78. “Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.”
― Ishmael Reed
79. “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
― Don Marquis
80. “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
― Robert Frost
81. “Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.”
― Rumi
82. “Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.”
― Stanley Kunitz
83. “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley
84. “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley
85. “It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”
― Stephane Mallarme
86. “Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.”
― Diane Ackerman
87. “All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.”
― Edith Sitwell
88. “Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.”
― Linton Kwesi Johnson
89. “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”
― Aristotle
90. “Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite impressions.”
― Philibert Joseph Roux
