Top 472 Poetry Quotes

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.

I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.