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Poetry Quotes

‘Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.’ Dennis Gabor. Only a poet could have explained poetry so beautifully. Subtle, deep, exquisite, elegant - a poem is all that and more. The words are stringed together in perfect harmony to give a delightful composition. Reading a magnificent piece of poetry will make you a bit philosophical and ensure that you enjoy every bit of the experience. A poem usually comes from experience and is therefore heartfelt and earnest. Read the following famous quotations and sayings on poetry to know more.

Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire

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.

Personality
T. S. Eliot
Plutarch

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Painting
Plutarch
Wallace Stevens

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

World
Wallace Stevens
William Wordsworth

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Emotions
William Wordsworth
Robert Frost

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost
Michael Sheen

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence.

Confidence Mothers
Michael Sheen
Robert Frost

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

Emotions Words Thought
Robert Frost
Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry.

Money
Wallace Stevens
Edgar Allan Poe

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

Beauty Creativity Words
Edgar Allan Poe
Jim Morrison

Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.

Jim Morrison
Saint Thomas Aquinas

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder

Love Authors Opinion Perception
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Audre Lorde

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.

Vision Future Change
Audre Lorde
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Dancing
Carl Sandburg
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I know nothing new except that Herr Gellert, the Leipzig poet, is dead, and has written no more poetry since his death.

Death Nothing
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Emily Dickinson

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Body
Emily Dickinson
T. S. Eliot

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot
Robert Frost

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert Frost
Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry.

Food
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ben Shapiro

America's liberal arts universities have long been safe zones for leftist thinking, protected ivory towers for the pseudo-elite who earn their livings writing papers nobody reads about gender roles in the poetry of Maya Angelou.

Thinking
Ben Shapiro
Joseph Gordon-Levitt

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

Things History Literature
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
T. S. Eliot

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Time
T. S. Eliot
Honoré de Balzac

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Love Senses
Honoré de Balzac
John Dryden

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

Dancing
John Dryden

Ah! on Thanksgiving day.... When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before. What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?

Love Mother’s Day Affection Appreciation
John Greenleaf Whittier
Edgar Allan Poe

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

Fear Imagination Religion
Edgar Allan Poe
Emily Dickinson

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickinson
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Carl Sandburg
Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Life
Wallace Stevens
Salvador Dali

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

Funny Humor Romance Observation
Salvador Dali
Thomas Hobbes

Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.

Pleasure Benefit Proverbs Truth
Thomas Hobbes
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

Carl Sandburg
John Greenleaf Whittier

From the death of the old the new proceeds, and the life of truth from the death of creeds.

Death Inspiration Life Motivation
John Greenleaf Whittier
Anthony Hopkins

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Anthony Hopkins
Virginia Woolf

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

People Friendship
Virginia Woolf
Andre Gide

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

Andre Gide
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Art Personality
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Alice Walker

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

Revolt Revolution
Alice Walker
Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Carl Sandburg
Nikki Giovanni

Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream - they go together.

Good Music Togetherness
Nikki Giovanni
Bob Dylan

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

Bob Dylan
W. H. Auden

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Love Language
W. H. Auden
Charlie Sheen

I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.

Time
Charlie Sheen
Lisa Bonet

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

Community
Lisa Bonet
David Lee Roth

Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos.

Music
David Lee Roth
Viggo Mortensen

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

Painting
Viggo Mortensen
Bette Midler

Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

Music
Bette Midler
T. S. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

T. S. Eliot
William Butler Yeats

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

William Butler Yeats
Robert Browning

God is the perfect poet.

Robert Browning
Wallace Stevens

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Love Words
Wallace Stevens
Lisa Marie Presley

I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I've loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.

Life Music Time
Lisa Marie Presley
Gilbert K. Chesterton

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Charles Baudelaire

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Time
Charles Baudelaire
Socrates

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Wisdom
Socrates
Bertrand Russell

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Excellence Mathematics
Bertrand Russell
Jorge Luis Borges

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Art
Jorge Luis Borges
Jim Morrison

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

People
Jim Morrison
Charles Baudelaire

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Music Dancing
Charles Baudelaire
Carl Sandburg

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

Carl Sandburg
Amy Winehouse

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

Togetherness
Amy Winehouse
Wallace Stevens

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

People Water
Wallace Stevens
Vincent Van Gogh

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

Vincent Van Gogh
Wallace Stevens

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Bible
Wallace Stevens
Edgar Allan Poe

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

Zeal Purpose
Edgar Allan Poe
Emilio Estevez

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream.

Death
Emilio Estevez
Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Food
Charles Baudelaire
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Greatness
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Tom Hanks

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope.

Physics
Tom Hanks
Charlie Chaplin

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Charlie Chaplin

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

Life Time
T. S. Eliot
W. H. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Music Art
W. H. Auden
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.

Sadness Happiness
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Stephen Colbert

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

School Newspaper
Stephen Colbert
Samuel Johnson

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

Art Pleasure Truth
Samuel Johnson
Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

Words
Vladimir Nabokov
Steven Wright

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Reading
Steven Wright

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

Trying
John Cusack
Virginia Woolf

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Virginia Woolf
Voltaire

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Words
Voltaire
Khalil Gibran

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

Pain Wonder Excitement
Khalil Gibran
John Ruskin

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.

Spirit Nature
John Ruskin

I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.

World
Anya Taylor-Joy
Taika Waititi

My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.

Teachers
Taika Waititi
John F. Kennedy

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Haughtiness Power
John F. Kennedy
Robert Frost

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Life
Robert Frost
Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Emily Dickinson
Horace

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Water
Horace
Viggo Mortensen

I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.

People Painting
Viggo Mortensen
John Ruskin

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Religion
John Ruskin
Charles Baudelaire

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

Progress Hatred
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Time
Charles Baudelaire
T. S. Eliot

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Time Language
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Business
T. S. Eliot
J. K. Rowling

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

J. K. Rowling
John Ruskin

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

World Religion Soul
John Ruskin
Jessie Buckley

My mum is a singer and harpist, and my dad writes fantastic poetry, so we've grown up around a lot of words and music.

Music Words
Jessie Buckley
James Russell Lowell

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Beauty Truth
James Russell Lowell
Denis Villeneuve

Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.

Denis Villeneuve
Plato

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Truth History
Plato