Top 100 Poetry Is Poetry Quotes
#1. Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
Wallace Stevens
#2. Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
Marvin Bell
#3. 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
#6. 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
#8. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#9. He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.
Dejan Stojanovic
#10. 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
#11. Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.
Louis Untermeyer
#12. Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.
Joseph Joubert
#17. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#18. Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.
Hafez
#19. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#20. 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.
#21. 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
#22. This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me
Walt Whitman
#24. your smile.
is the ultimate
golden dream.
all the poems
in the world
are waking up from.
Sanober Khan
#25. There is no poetry or song.
There is no short or long.
There is only you.
Debasish Mridha
#26. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.
Luis Gonzalez
#27. 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
#28. What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Czeslaw Milosz
#29. Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.
Mahmoud Darwish
#30. 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
#31. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde
#32. 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
#33. The problem with love is not what we feel but what we wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel something.
Nikki Giovanni
#34. Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.
Dan Simmons
#35. 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
#36. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
#40. 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
#41. The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind ... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.
Laura Riding
#42. Nothing is lifeless
when the moon writes its screed
on the silvern sand silence
-From the poem:The Universe In Blossom
Munia Khan
#43. 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
#44. For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.
Nathalie Sarraute
#45. Then, the door opens and there he is; silhouetted in the hall light. Long hair, long legs, and a heartbeat in tune with my own.
Hunter S. Jones
#46. History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
Aristotle.
#47. All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.
Sophie Hannah
#48. 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
#49. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese
#50. Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new:
Endless labor all along,
Endless labor to be wrong:
Phrase that Time has flung away;
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
Samuel Johnson
#52. One thing I feel is this: that a great deal of poetry is the product of adolescence-or of an emotionally adolescent frame of mind: and that as this state of mind changes, poetry is likely to dry up.
James Agee
#53. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire
#54. Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone,
While pain and guilt still linger here below,
Blindness and numbness
these please me alone;
Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
#55. Even poetry, you know, is in one sense an infinite brag & exaggeration.
Henry David Thoreau
#56. (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
#57. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#58. I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.
May Sarton
#59. Love's language is imprecise,
fits more like mittens than gloves.
Jeannine Atkins
#60. Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
#61. Winter is already a lost shape, forgotten
in the ground. Instead, here is Spring
with all the grace of a woman
smoothing out her apron.
Cecilia Llompart
#62. Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.
Robert Graves
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.
John Keats
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. It is so hard to stay afloat in a world
that just wants to drown you.
Schuyler Peck
#69. What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth
Mary Jo Bang
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,
is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.
Henry David Thoreau
#75. There is a voice in my head that is only silenced by the scratching of my pen
Jessica-Lynn Barbour
#77. If perfection is absurd, why is tragedy common?
John Most
#78. All we're trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.
Eamon Grennan
#79. our foundation is rocky
because we made a home
in each other's skin.
the damage is beginning
to show.
K.Y. Robinson
#81. When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what
did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed
a noun.
Gertrude Stein
#82. 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
#83. If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.
Kathy Acker
#84. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#85. This road is a winding one.
We left the west flooded
with new loneliness.
Donika Kelly
#86. The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#87. Free will is like fallen
leaves agreeing to be
where they are.
Salamanca
#88. 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
#89. Poetry is what you can't translate. Art is what you can't define. Film is what you can't explain. But we're going to try, anyway.
James Monaco
#90. 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
#91. Reality is not made of dreams, until you make them real.
Soar
#92. 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
#94. I define influence simply as literary love, tempered by defense. The defenses vary from poet to poet. But the overwhelming presence of love is vital to understanding how great literature works.
Harold Bloom
#95. In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Richard M. Nixon
#96. 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
#97. The poet will maintain serenity in spite of all disappointments. He is expected to preserve an unconcerned and healthy outlook over the world, while he lives.
Henry David Thoreau
#98. I travel the broad path as is the way of youth, I give myself to vice unmindful of virtue, I am eager for the pleasure of the flesh more than salvation, my soul is dead and I shall look after the flesh.
Carl Orff
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