Top 100 It Is Poetry Quotes
#1. Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.
Alex Ebert
#2. At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.
Rudyard Kipling
#3. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#4. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde
#5. 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
#6. What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
Charles Baudelaire
#7. Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.
Joseph Joubert
#8. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#9. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#10. Poetry is more than just art, it's like super glue to a broken heart. It can also be a light when your life seems a little dark.
Delano Johnson
#11. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.
Luis Gonzalez
#12. I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Robert Hass
#13. 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
#14. Poetry is not communication with angels or with the "subconscious." It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more.
Thomas Pynchon
#15. Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.
Dan Simmons
#16. I am trying to both be happy and pay attention to the world around me. I do not know if it is possible to do both at the same time.
Blythe Baird
#17. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#18. It still is on the run,
time that is.
Sometimes it seems like everything's changing;
my whole world is rearranging.
Everything's different,
and yet everything's the same.
Time is just a crazy game.
Amanda Leigh
#19. Fire is calling my name. It is whispering words of encouragement, sweet things. It wants out, for me to fan the heat until it's a vortex that can't and won't be stopped.
Alexandra Bracken
#20. This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.
Mary Oliver
#21. You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
Madeleine L'Engle
#22. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese
#24. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
Robert Graves
#25. When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on".
Fred Rogers
#26. 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
#27. When I usually outshine the light, I look for evanescence. The ending to my resplendence is much more divine, when it's singing a sweet lullaby of captured shine.
Lionel Suggs
#28. It is so hard to stay afloat in a world
that just wants to drown you.
Schuyler Peck
#29. This is hell,
but I planned it. I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.
Alan Dugan
#32. Then who is it?" said Arthur. "Well," said Ford, "if we're lucky it's just the Vogons come to throw us in to space." "And if we're unlucky?" "If we're unlucky," said Ford grimly, "the captain might be serious in his threat that he's going to read us some of his poetry first ... .
Douglas Adams
#33. She lends her pen,
to thoughts of him,
that flow from it,
in her solitary.
For she is his poet,
And he is her poetry.
Lang Leav
#34. Sex with an ex
Is it ever really painless or just inviting stress?
I mean, really
Who does that?
Oh wait, I'm sure if they could, most everyone would ...
Natasha Ramsey
#35. I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
Edward Hirsch
#36. He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler
Soren Kierkegaard
#37. To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.
John Ciardi
#38. Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry ...
Elizabeth Janeway
#39. I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.
Louis MacNeice
#40. Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
Tracy K. Smith
#41. While the world has found the right names for all chronic mental diseases, I believe poetry is also a brain dysfunction, yet the only one that owns itself the mastery for the cure. Isn't it lovely to say, "He/She suffers of Poetry?".
Ioana-Cristina Casapu
#42. Matt smirked. Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry?
Jessica Park
#43. Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.
John Cage
#44. Loneliness of heart
In the still of the night my heart doth cry out, who can hear it for time is far spent. In the darkness in the shadow of the depth I find isolation and fear ...
M.I. Ghostwriter
#45. the hope is small
but it is everything.
AVA.
#46. In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.
Patrick Kavanagh
#47. Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
Georges Braque
#48. It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
John Taylor Gatto
#49. The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both.
Victor Hugo
#50. It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
Randall Jarrell
#51. Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Derek Walcott
#52. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.
Charles Bukowski
#53. How can the confessor teach/ those who are lost and sick at heart,/ when he himself, among the sinners,/ is worst, and most forsaken?/ It is only a game we play/ with other people's sins./ Besides, everyone knows/ that everyone lies confessing.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#54. But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
Wislawa Szymborska
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.
Subramanya Bharathi
#58. Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.
James Tate
#60. I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
Stella Benson
#61. Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.
Anthony Hecht
#62. Being a poet in the States is quite different from being one in China, because in the States poetry depends on the universities for its support. They finance the poets and help them get published. That isn't so in China. But overall it is the same. You can't change society with poetry.
Bei Dao
#63. you say you often feel this madness. what do you do when it comes upon you?
I write poetry.
is poetry madness?
non-poetry is madness.
what is madness?
madness is ugliness.
what is ugly?
to each man, something different.
Charles Bukowski
#64. 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
#65. Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.
Robert Morgan
#66.
Who knows what death, anxiety of the living,
Who knows what loneliness, end of the loving
I could say to myself of the love (I had):
Let it not be immortal, since it is flame
But let it be infinite while it lasts.
Vinicius De Moraes
#67. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.
Jim Carroll
#68. I like putting common expressions next to uncommon expressions. I'm sure in Poetry 101 there is a name for it, but it seems like you usually go one way or the other in rock music.
Dan Bejar
#69. The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
Hannah Arendt
#70. Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault,
Yusef Komunyakaa
#71. I find it incredibly amazing how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade. No cloud is ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece. A new wonder. A new memory.
Sanober Khan
#72. Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy.
Nizar Qabbani
#73. 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
#74. The Lord's Prayer is the most perfect piece of poetry. I always feel at peace and moved when I recite it.
Mary Quant
#75. When the petals fall
Say it is beautiful and good, say it is well
May Sarton
#76. Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.
Patti Smith
#77. love
is giving everything too easily
then staying to try and claw it back
Andrew McMillan
#78. The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.
John Ciardi
#79. They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer - some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky - are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one's life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.
Brenda Ueland
#81. You call it hope - that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire.
Edgar Allan Poe
#82. Kill what you can't save
what you can't eat throw out
what you can't throw out bury
What you can't bury give away
what you can't give away you must carry with you,
it is always heavier than you thought.
Margaret Atwood
#83. Take your materials from what is around you - if you see a dandelion, write about that; if it's misty, write about the mist. The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion.
Masaoka Shiki
#84. Zeal is not of necessity religion, neither is it always of the same essence with poetry or patriotism.
Herman Melville
#85. The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Seamus Heaney
#86. Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only two things that are truly international, poetry and wine.
Nikki Giovanni
#87. I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
Ted Hughes
#88. There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.
Edward Hirsch
#89. Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
#90. It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.
Helen Bevington
#91. A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.
C.S. Lewis
#92. Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
G.K. Chesterton
#93. Virtually everyone needs motivation of some sort, but when you are in love - that is motivation enough, it turns many into poets and painters, it spurs the creativity in you.
Bernard Kelvin Clive
#94. Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That's what I was looking for.
Allen Ginsberg
#95. You ask how it is possible to be your own father and son. You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream.
Dejan Stojanovic
#96. The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.
Henri Michaux
#98. Poetry is simple when you write what you see and feel, searching for the words only makes it difficult
Rayvon L. Browne
#99. I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
#100. Happiness is not about hiding the past, it's accepting today and making it last, You should not fear who you have become, have pride in yourself for all you have done. Stand tall and be proud to be who you are, Release your fears and brighten your star.
Kylie Abecca
