Poetry Quotes

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Robert Lynd

The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

James F. Cooper

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast.

Jean de la Bruyere

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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

Emily Dickinson

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul

Thomas Moore

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Brooks Atkinson

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

Jakob Burckhardt

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamour of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers wives.

Hamlin Garland

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

John Wain

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart

Peggy Noonan

Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.

Voltaire

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Charles Simic

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking

John Wain

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

William Wordsworth