Top 100 Best Poetry Sayings
#1. The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
Matthew Arnold
#2. The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem.
May Swenson
#3. 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
#4. The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
Philip Levine
#5. Photography's potential as a great image-maker and communicator is really no different from the same potential in the best poetry where familiar, everyday words, placed within a special context, can soar above the intellect and touch subtle reality in a unique way.
Paul Caponigro
#6. But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
W.S. Merwin
#7. Some of the best music was composed by Beethovan,but he was deaf,some of the best poetry of nature was written by Milton,but he was deaf.possible is always inside the impossible ...
Shibin Mohammed
#8. According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader".
Chris Kraus
#9. I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.
Miller Williams
#10. I believe the best poetry of our times is growing too artistic; the study is too visible. If freedom and naturalness are lost out of poetry, everything worth having is lost.
Lucy Larcom
#11. That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.
Walter Savage Landor
#12. Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#13. Believing in yourself is the best poetry.
Marty Rubin
#14. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#15. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#16. I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
David Knopfler
#17. Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.
Alexander McCall Smith
#18. Dear:
I am dying
without you, and I won't be dying long. But don't come.
Best always,
Frank
Frank O'Hara
#19. Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.
Jim Goetz
#20. She wore her scars
as her best attire.
A stunning dress
made of hellfire.
Daniel Saint
#21. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#22. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Tobias Wolff
#23. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#24. Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,
When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,
Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,
But never will be sung to us again,
Is they remembrance. Now the hour of rest
Hath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#25. I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.
Ellen Hopkins
#26. Now, in our opinion no author should be blamed for obscurity, nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.
Alice Meynell
#27. To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
E. E. Cummings
#28. If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Randall Jarrell
#29. We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#30. Sound is the one true vocabulary of nature
and not the peacock-palette painters swear
he uses for his best stuff, for his daily disposable frescoes ["Sound," Poetry, September 2015].
Billy Ramsell
#31. We have careful thought for the stranger,
And smiles for the sometime guest;
But oft for 'our own' the bitter tone,
Though we love our own the best.
Margaret E. Sangster
#32. There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
Rupert Brooke
#33. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#35. The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
Clifton Fadiman
#36. I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.
Charles Bukowski
#37. When trying to explain anything, I usually find that the Bible, that great collection of magnificent and varied poetry, has said it before in the best possible way.
Amy Lowell
#38. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
James Lasdun
#39. The first kiss and the first glass of wine are the best.
Marty Rubin
#40. And tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me ...
Sarah Kane
#41. you are
as fleetingly beautiful
as a mother's tears
and a father's pranks
a brother's bachelorhood
and a best friend's bad mood
a bride's glittering jitters
and a handsome stranger's smile.
Sanober Khan
#42. To mee, who with eternal Famine pine,
Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven,
There best, where most with ravin I might meet;
Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems
To stuff this Maw, this vast unhide-bound Corpse.
John Milton
#43. Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.
Grant Morrison
#44. If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there.
Khalil Gibran
#45. Unconditional love is furnished by many 4 legged creatures, but chiefly by human kinds best friend DOG!
Ladee Basset
#46. I did best when I had least truth for my subjects.
John Donne
#47. Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything.
Nicolas Chamfort
#48. Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.
Harold Bloom
#49. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#50. Read something of interest every day - something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.
Jane Yolen
#52. Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
James Broughton
#53. You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the
poet's consciousness in his best moods.
George Eliot
#54. Lay a golden egg.
After you built a nest,
You wait for a leg.
And you land next.
Now you hope and pray.
Expect for the best.
Go on with no delay.
Get it right at last.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#55. You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.
Virginia Woolf
#56. Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.
Elizabeth Strout
#57. I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days!
Frank O'Hara
#58. It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come. -Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne
#59. I'd also heard that humans were a life-form of, at best, middling intelligence and prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry, and walking around in circles.
Matt Haig
#60. The best words in the best order ... one always go the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Poetry was awful good material to think with.
Mary Stewart
#61. Love makes you do,
the best of things.
Love makes you do,
the worst of things,
It's a feeling extreme,
that doesn't exist in between.
Jasleen Kaur Gumber
#62. Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.
Maurice Druon
#63. Poetry is best written with the growl and the gut. The heart and the head should be the realm to the reader.
Jeremy Young
#64. With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.
Lascelles Abercrombie
#65. I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.
Denise Duhamel
#66. Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies
Oscar Sparrow
#67. Days like this, like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to
get through to you. What do you see today?
what is it? where are you?
the best days are sometimes the first,
sometimes the middle and even sometimes the last
Charles Bukowski
#68. Since a true knowledge of nature gives us pleasure, a lively imitation of it, either in poetry or painting, must produce a much greater; for both these arts are not only true imitations of nature, but of the best nature.
John Dryden
#69. For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#70. At times it has been doubtful to me if Emerson really knows or feels what Poetry is at its highest, as in the Bible, for instance, or Homer or Shakspeare. I see he covertly or plainly likes best superb verbal polish, or something old or odd
Walt Whitman
#71. It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.
Seamus Heaney
#72. Listen, / my wary one, it's far too late / to unlove each other.
William Matthews
#73. It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
Boris Pasternak
#74. Where the cheerful children
of unwritten poems,
play all around,
you will find me there.
Khadija Rupa
#76. As in art, poetry, music, etc., the best theology is worked out in pain
Steve Chalke
#77. The sign of a true woman isn't the ability to recite French poetry or play the pianoforte or cook Chateaubriand. The sign of a true woman is learning to listen to her own voice even when society does its best to drown it out.
Eve Marie Mont
#78. He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line "The land was ours before we were the land's." What a scandal that would be, America's best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry.
Jim Harrison
#79. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.
Donald McCaig
#80. The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care.
Oscar Wilde
#81. Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.
Tom Robbins
#82. Like the best convenience store in the world, / the mind is always open.
Leza Lowitz
#83. This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.
Walt Whitman
#84. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#85. The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.
Criss Jami
#86. Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#87. Welcome, thou kind deceiver!
Thou best of thieves: who, with an easy key,
Dost open life, and, unperceived by us,
Even steal us from ourselves.
John Dryden
#88. Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both "dream factories."
Denise Duhamel
#89. Isn't it worth missing whatever joy / you might have dreamed, to wake in the night and find / you and your beloved are holding hands in your sleep?
Galway Kinnell
#90. The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.
Daniel J. Rice
#91. My best testimonies are from the times I thought I couldn't survive.
Tanya R. Liverman
#92. The best part was
pulling down the
shades
stuffing the doorbell
with rags
putting the phone
in the
refrigerator
and going to bed
for 3 or 4
days. and the next best
part
was
nobody ever
missed
me.
Charles Bukowski
#93. Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God's mouth, each other out of the music from God's heart.
Maya Angelou
#95. Who loves you most, and loves you best, and thinks of you when others rest? 'Tis Emilie.
Emily Dickinson
#96. We cannot see the best things in life, we can only feel them. A poet tries to describe those indescribable feelings in a language of emotions and inner perceptions.
Debasish Mridha
#97. Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.
George Orwell
#98. Auden? Does he rhyme? I only like poetry that rhymes. All
the best poets write in rhyme."
"Really?"
"Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare. You can't do better than that.
Shiela Jane
#99. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.
Dylan Thomas
#100. If our goal is to write poetry, the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.
Donald Hall
