Top 100 Good Poetry Sayings
#1. Let my name perish,
the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,
and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.
Sidney Lanier
#2. The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower
Michael Longley
#3. Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry ... Friendship ... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me - God of love only knows where.
Robert Burns
#4. The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
Amiri Baraka
#5. A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.
Claudia Rankine
#6. Good poetry is like effective prayer, it feeds the human spirit, it nourishes, it puts us in touch with forces far greater than ourselves
Lorna Goodison
#7. Heartache makes
for good poetry,
heartburn
not so much.
S. Tarr
#8. But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.
Stanislaw Lem
#9. Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.
David Whyte
#10. Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
June Jordan
#11. I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.
Marcus Mumford
#12. Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others.
Bryant McGill
#13. If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!
Aldous Huxley
#14. Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#15. It's as serious as anyone ever gets, you know. It's just words. It's just good poetry.
Paul McCartney
#16. Boy, this is your lucky day!" She clapped her hands. "You found yourself a librarian! I can help wit the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I'm at it. It's what I do.
Joe Hill
#17. Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn
#18. To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.
Charles Bukowski
#20. Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.
Matthew Arnold
#21. When you write a song it's sometimes in a desperate moment whn you can't really articulate it. What I love about lyrics is what T.S. Eliot said: 'Good poetry is felt before it is heard.' I'm a believer in that. It's those moments when you sit yourself down, and talk to yourself in the mirror.
Marcus Mumford
#22. Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,
epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. My idea of good poetry is any dog doing anything.
J. Boone
#24. The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.
Robert Morgan
#25. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.
Bertrand Russell
#26. There are few things in this life more bamboo-under-fingernails than good poetry read aloud badly-unless it is bad poetry read aloud badly.
Josh Lanyon
#27. Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.
Richard Hell
#28. All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.
Lord Alfred Douglas
#29. Life is about making mistakes. If you don't take chances, blindfolded and frightened as you are, you're not really living, are you? Heartache makes you stronger. Misery is the stuff of good poetry. You're denying yourself much more than the bad things in life by listening to Zita's fortunes.
Kimberly Karalius
#30. It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
Philip Larkin
#31. One can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid
Charles Bukowski
#32. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...
William Wordsworth
#33. Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
Henry David Thoreau
#34. Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.
Daniel Radcliffe
#35. I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.
Alice Sebold
#36. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter - a mishmash of good intentions and ill design. And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.
Walter Mosley
#37. (1)BEING A POET
is like opening a car door
& exposing yourself.
(2)BEING A GOOD POET
is like opening the door
& exposing the passenger
as well.
Chocolate Waters
#38. There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson
#39. I was twenty when I discovered war and photography. I can't say that I wanted to bear witness and change the world. I had no good moral reasons: I just loved adventure, I loved the poetry of war, the poetry of chaos, and I found that there was a kind of grace in weaving between the bullets.
Luc Delahaye
#40. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#41. You are afraid to let anyone in, but you still leave the door open, hoping someone good will shut the door behind him and throw away the keys.
Jenim Dibie
#42. Poetry is good for unleashing images.
Paula Rego
#43. From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.
Diane Wakoski
#44. In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night ... starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music.
Jim Morrison
#45. Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,
Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:
The worth of all men by their end esteem,
And then praise, or due reproach them yield.
Edmund Spenser
#46. I've been used to consider poetry as the food of love " Mr.Darcy
Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away." Eliza
Jane Austen
#47. I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion.
Zona Gale
#48. When the petals fall
Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well
May Sarton
#49. If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
#50. I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.
Mark Twain
#51. And all the hurts and scars / Of everyday were healed, and I would sleep / Safe with the good-night memory of stars.
Jane Merchant
#52. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
Kim Edwards
#53. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#54. Francesca was feeling good feelings, old feelings, poetry and music feelings.
Robert James Waller
#55. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.
Robert Lowell
#56. It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public.
Fran Lebowitz
#57. Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
#58. It's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life.
Billy Collins
#59. 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
#60. Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.
Osbert Sitwell
#61. But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
Diane Wakoski
#62. People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
Clive James
#63. My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
Herschel Walker
#64. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#66. 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
#67. The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.
Fernando Pessoa
#68. I plan to be a sinner tonight. Could've been something else, but looked way too good in my red dress to be anything Christian.
Alysia Harris
#69. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
#70. You better ignore this.
You better staple your eyes shut
and put pot-lids over your ears
and pinch your nose with vice grips
and cement your mouth shut
with real cement and while
you're at it or in it or whatever
cut off your hands for good measure
B.J. Ward
#72. From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
Allen Ginsberg
#73. Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
Geoffrey Hill
#74. Oh, it's a beautiful day, it's an elegant, graceful day, and I'm sailing down the Strip in glamorous Las Vegas, on my motor scooter, in company with a certified illegal prostitute who loves poetry and remembers it. Sonofabitch, I'm a real writer! I used to worry about it, but no more. Life is good.
Peter S. Beagle
#75. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#76. The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of his heart.
Kate DiCamillo
#77. As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch
#78. 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
#79. Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.
Dejan Stojanovic
#80. Music is good, not evil. Poetry is good, not evil. Primitive, but oh, so true!
Dmitri Shostakovich
#81. One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
William Wordsworth
#82. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
Sylvia Plath
#83. For nursery days are gone, nightmare is
real and there are no good Fairies.
The fox's teeth are in the bunny
and nothing can remove them, honey.
Gavin Ewart
#84. 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.
Anthony Hecht
#85. To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.
Mahmoud Darwish
#86. Poetry is a story
that is so good,
It doesn't need
complete sentences.
John Smyth
#87. Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ...
Elif Shafak
#88. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
Wislawa Szymborska
#89. With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.
Roman Payne
#90. You only have to do one good thing to be in somebody's lifetime of prayers.
Sanober Khan
#91. A lifetime isn't long enough for the beauty of this world
and the responsibilities of your life.
Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.
Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.
In the glare of your mind, be modest.
And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
Mary Oliver
#92. Good religious poetry ... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.
A.E. Housman
#93. Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter ... the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing
John Milton
#94. One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#95. Words are fossilized butterfly wings,
pretty to look at sometimes,
but only good for Museums.
I want to miserably burn down the Museums.
Jeremiah Walton
#96. I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy.
"Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is
strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I
am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.
Jane Austen
#97. I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
Robert Morgan
#98. But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
Robert Graves
#99. The robin brushes me at dusk.
Our good bones fail. We leave no mark.
His voice, she writes, was clear and quiet.
I hear him singing in the dark.
("Edward Thomas' Daughter")
Alison Brackenbury
#100. Develop distinct habits of wreaking havoc on any stinking thinking addicted to launching mental missiles aimed at sinking your unique magic.
Curtis Tyrone Jones
