Top 100 On Poetry Quotes
#1. She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her 'Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir.
Charles Dickens
#2. If you ever have children, tell them they must always be drunk. Drunk on love, drunk on poetry, drunk on wine, it doesn't matter. This world is too goddamn painful to waste a second of your existence sober.
Benjamin Hale
#3. 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
#5. It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that he always insists on poetry being poetical.
G.K. Chesterton
#6. I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.
Marv Levy
#7. On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means.
But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
Mary Oliver
#8. It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire
#10. The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#11. I don't have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#12. I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
John Ashbery
#13. Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.
Vito Acconci
#14. Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.
Martin Espada
#15. I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
Christina Perri
#16. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#17. By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.
Rita Dove
#18. Steep fall to the ground
shattering
like clay pigeons
missed
by bad shots
and unsteady hands.
Jessica Kristie
#19. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
Ed Koch
#20. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#21. It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.
Meg Rosoff
#22. 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
#23. Since the dawn of time, primitive humans thought, loved and had poetry. They also pooped on everything. It was horrible.
Dana Gould
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Nothing is lifeless
when the moon writes its screed
on the silvern sand silence
-From the poem:The Universe In Blossom
Munia Khan
#27. Dying only means moving into a nicer house.
We have only gone into the next room.
We still are what we have always been.
We aren't far away. We are only on the other side of the pathway.
Kerry Okines
#28. After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#29. In this quiet place on a quiet street
where no one ever finds us
gently, lovingly, freedom gives back our pain.
from poem In a Quiet Place on a Quiet Street
Aberjhani
#30. I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.
Matt Haig
#31. I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play,
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away;
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street,
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.
Charles Baudelaire
#32. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#33. 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
#34. A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.
B.J. Ward
#35. every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay.
AVA.
#36. And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.
A.B. Paterson
#38. Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
Mahmoud Darwish
#39. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#40. Winter noon is on the rise. Weak suns yet alive
are as virtue to suns of that other day.
For the poor town dreams
of surrender, mother
never untender,
mother gallant
and gay.
Anne Carson
#41. Because you fight it out, and stumble, and write bad poetry, and pick yourself up again, and at the end, hopefully, someday youre sitting with your kid on her bedroom floor, talking about how you screwed everything up too.
Josie Bloss
#42. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#43. I balance you
on the end of my pen.
Teetering between love
and letting go.
Jessica Kristie
#44. This is my life and lovestory listen losely and hold on tight this a roller coaster hell of a ride
Patrick Cruz
#45. In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
Frederick Lenz
#46. Everything is connected. We see the signs every moment. There are miracles waiting to happen!
Avijeet Das
#47. The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#48. Some say, don't burn your bridges.
I say, if necessary,
let the kerosene
kiss it on the lips,
and watch it
turn to ash.
There's always more than one way
to cross the water.
Rudy Francisco
#49. With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.
Philip Schultz
#50. Like a speeding train
I am passing by...
I don't know
where I'm heading
with whom or why
all I know is that
I will never, ever
pass from here again
all I know is I'm skidding forward
on this track of life.
Sanober Khan
#51. Cotton rows crisscross the world
And dead-tired nights of yearning
Thunderbolts on leather strops
And all my body burning
Sugar cane reach up to God
And every baby crying
Shame a blanket of my night
And all my days are dying
Maya Angelou
#52. I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, 'It was 1860 and it was winter ... '
Gary Oldman
#53. a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.
Ted Kooser
#54. even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like.
N'Zuri Za Austin
#55. Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened,
Vera Pavlova
#56. You can't build a life
on another human being. We're foundations
of sand. We're Atlas buckling under the sky.
Elisabeth Hewer
#57. Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.
Erasmus Darwin
#58. There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
#59. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage
#60. I've never seen beauty
so devastating
as in the lines
that trace our hope
and fall from the stars.
Jessica Kristie
#61. 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
#62. [Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!
Anne Carson
#63. Once in a while i am struck
all over again... by just how blue
the sky appears .. on wind-played
autumn mornings, blue enough
to bruise a heart.
Sanober Khan
#64. 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
#65. Poetry has saved me on occasions when people couldn't.
Sanober Khan
#66. You do not see the painting in the attic
The maggots on skin that tear.
The beauty is a trick.
Narcissus - promise naught but air...' ~ Dorian Gray
Stella Coulson
#67. I build boxes
and place them at your feet,
to measure the distance
between dreams and reality.
Jessica Kristie
#68. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't.
Dorianne Laux
#69. The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment
Wallace Stevens
#70. She was too busy wishing
on shooting stars
to see the dreams
come true around her.
Atticus Poetry
#71. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#72. That night, stargazing on the deck with Dad, eyes on the sky, he pointed out Orion, Betelgeuse. "It's an art to read the stars, baby."
I never wanted to leave his side-my sure song for so long. Now? His eyes are stone changed. Just looking at them hurts my heart.
Norma Fox Mazer
#73. Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
Jeanette Winterson
#74. It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.
Frank O'Hara
#76. As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#77. Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.
David Mitchell
#78. The same that oft-times hath
charm'd magic casements,
opening on the foam
of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.
John Keats
#79. No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.
Knut Hamsun
#80. L'art
Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.
Ezra Pound
#81. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#82. I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.
We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.
-In the yellow time of pollen
Luke Davies
#83. Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
Daisaku Ikeda
#84. there have been mornings
so quiet and tender
like a poem, on Thursday's lips
that I wondered
if I'd been kissed at all...
Sanober Khan
#85. Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom
and wherever deserved.
Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.
Louise Bogan
#86. Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was introduced to the right poem.
Natasha Trethewey
#87. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#88. I call my style, "Poetry in Motion." So I'm working on a new art to make fighting even more beautiful.
Bobby Green
#89. 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
#90. Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
Aaron Belz
#91. I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.
Edward Hirsch
#92. There are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
Charles Bukowski
#93. La poe sie veutquelque chose d'e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.
Denis Diderot
#94. On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read.
Viggo Mortensen
#95. On sighting mathematicians poetry should unhook the algebra from their minds and replace it with poetry; on sighting poets it should unhook poetry from their minds and replace it with algebra.
Brian Patten
#96. Think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
#97. We fall into the old stuff of textuality, and almost everything becomes safe because nobody wants to talk about what is not safe in poetry. We fall back on the psychologic, the ethnic, the quota, and serve the perpetuation of the machine.
Fady Joudah
#98. love ridden
i searched for you
in corridors,
open doors
and in endless seas
of similes
and metaphors
but we never were
on the same page.
K.Y. Robinson
#99. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
Sanober Khan
#100. I find that when people haven't found God and do not know the new birth and the Spirit is not on them, yet they have the ancient impulse to worship something. If they're not educated they kill a chicken and put a funny thing on their head and dance around. If they are educated they write poetry.
A.W. Tozer
