Quotes on Poetry :: Finest Quotes

Poetry Quotes

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.

Wallace Stevens

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

Archibald MacLeish

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

Lucille Clifton

The one man who should never attempt an explanation on poetry is its author. If the poem can be improved by its author?s explanations, it never should have been published.

Archibald MacLeish

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

Robert Morgan

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.

Larry Summers

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

Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

Anthony Hecht

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

All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man

Bernard Berenson

Serious poetry deals with the fundamental conflicts that cannot be logically resolved: we can state the conflicts rationally, but reason does not relieve us of them.

Allen Tate

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

William Butler Yeats

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

John Drinkwater

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. The Conservative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

John Keats

Nothing will sustain you more potently than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may be thought, the true poetry of life.

Sir William Osler

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Ezra Pound

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Steven Pinker

If we can discover the meaning in the trilling of a frog, perhaps we may understand why it is for us not merely noise but a song of poetry and emotion.

Adrian Forsyth

Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

Muhammad Iqbal

We may live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man can not live without cooks. He may live without books,what is knowledge but grieving? He may live without hopewhat is hope but deceiving? He may live without love,what is passion but pining? But where is the man that can live without dining?

Robert Bulwer Lytton

Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

Poetry: the best words in the best order

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

Edgar Allan Poe

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

John Dryden

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