Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
‐‐ Don Marquis
Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.
‐‐ Seamus Heaney
Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
‐‐ Erica Jong
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
‐‐ Robert Frost
Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.
‐‐ Mary Oliver
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
‐‐ Franz Grillparzer
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch
Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.
‐‐ Franz Wright
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.
‐‐ A. R. Ammons
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
‐‐ John Ciardi
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
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.
‐‐ T. S. Eliot
Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
‐‐ Comte de Lautreamont
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
‐‐ Denis Diderot
Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
‐‐ Donald Hall
Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
‐‐ Anthony Hecht
Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.
‐‐ Mary Karr
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
‐‐ Jacques Maritain
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
‐‐ Jorge Luis Borges
Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.
‐‐ Natasha Trethewey
Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.
‐‐ Richard Hell
Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.
‐‐ Trevor McDonald
Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
‐‐ Marilyn Hacker
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
‐‐ Jack Prelutsky
Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.
‐‐ Peter Davison
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
‐‐ John Keats
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
‐‐ T. S. Eliot
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
‐‐ John Keats
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
‐‐ John Keats
Poetry stands or falls by its music.
‐‐ John Burnside
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
‐‐ Vincent Van Gogh
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch
Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.
‐‐ Jennifer McMahon
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
‐‐ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.
‐‐ Peter Davison
Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.
‐‐ Claire Tomalin
Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
‐‐ Christopher Koch
Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.
‐‐ Octavio Paz
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
‐‐ Alphonse de Lamartine
Poets are accepted in Canada as practically nowhere else in the West because of their place in an officially supported and popularly endorsed Canadian culture. Yet, they are still bitter and argumentative, as poets elsewhere are, because they have no audience as such, only a sanctioned role in the cultural scheme of things.
‐‐ George Fetherling
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
‐‐ Philip James Bailey
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
‐‐ Jim Jarmusch
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
‐‐ J. D. Salinger
Poets are born, not paid.
‐‐ Addison Mizner
Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
‐‐ Allen Ginsberg
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
‐‐ Robert Frost
Poets are like the decathletes of literature.
‐‐ Terrance Hayes
Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.
‐‐ Yusef Komunyakaa