Top 472 Poetry Quotes

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

A. R. Ammons

It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.

It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.

Earl Sweatshirt

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

Elizabeth Edwards

In the winter of 1940, 'The Atlantic Monthly' invited Peter Viereck, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate who had won the college's top essay and poetry prizes, to write about 'the meaning of young liberalism for the present age.'

Tom Reiss

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Victor Hugo

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

John Drinkwater

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Diane Wakoski

My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.

My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.

Tao Lin

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

James Fenton

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

James Dickey

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