Top 100 Poetry Is Quotes
#1. Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in cities.
Samuel Palmer
#2. I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.
Miller Williams
#3. Love is the reality, and poetry is the drum.
Rumi
#4. Poetry is a dumb Buddha who thinks a donkey is as important as a diamond.
Natalie Goldberg
#5. On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
Pablo Neruda
#7. Poetry, is a life long war waged
against ineffable beauty.
Atticus Poetry
#10. Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were
John Donne
#11. Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.
Carl Sandburg
#12. Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things; fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships; nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind.
Kelly Cherry
#13. The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.
Robert Pinsky
#14. The language of poetry is a language of deep intimacy that is meant to touch the human spirit and awaken it to the mystery of life, all life.
Ron Starbuck
#17. The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.
Edward Hirsch
#18. Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
Russell Baker
#19. If a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#20. Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.
Robert Pinsky
#21. Poetry...is full of visions pulled more from our hearts than from our minds. Our greatest poems are written in the dust of our deepest memories.
John Ritter
#22. Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.
Seamus Heaney
#23. Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Mark Strand
#24. The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#25. The committed student needs to be wide awake, to look and listen closely, to slow down, scrutinize and reflect. The language of poetry is so dense, so multivalent, that it demands a concentrated act of attention - and offers its greatest rewards only to those who reread.
Ezra Pound
#26. The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
Wallace Stevens
#28. Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.
Edwin Morgan
#29. If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
Archibald MacLeish
#30. Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.
Sarah Kay
#31. Poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.
May Sarton
#33. Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.
J. G. Stedman
#34. Poetry is not the most important thing in life ... I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.
Dylan Thomas
#36. Poetry is thoughts that breath and words that burn.
Thomas Grey
#37. Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.
Li-Young Lee
#39. To me and the rest of the world your poetry is a gift.
Delano Johnson
#40. All poetry is difficult to read - The sense of it anyhow.
Robert Browning
#41. I've always felt that poetry is the enemy of silence, but of course, in the right moments, silence can be useful. The trick is just trying to figure out when. And when I say silence, I suppose I actually meant erasure - poetry is a force against that, I think, or it should be.
Cornelius Eady
#42. Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.
Diane Glancy
#43. Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.
Adrian Mitchell
#44. Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.
Czeslaw Milosz
#45. Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her.
Jenim Dibie
#47. I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.
Alice Oswald
#49. Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#50. Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
Edward Hirsch
#51. Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades.
Boris Pasternak
#52. Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ... says heaven and earth in one word ... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time.
Christopher Fry
#53. The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait. I think it's the greatest art.
Sonia Sanchez
#54. Poetry is nothing if it exists only in books. One has to find it in one's own life.
Marty Rubin
#55. Poetry is the yearning of the soul to break free!
Avijeet Das
#56. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
John Drinkwater
#57. Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
Stanley Kunitz
#58. Now, I do say, "It's possible. You might be the first. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the odds are very much against you." All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.
Edward Hirsch
#59. Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.
Randall Jarrell
#60. My poetry is often criticized for a failure to communicate, but I take issue with this; my intention is to communicate and my feeling is that a poem that communicates something that's already known by the reader is not really communicating anything to him and in fact shows a lack of respect for him.
John Ashbery
#61. Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry (and I suppose that it is unlikely that he could do better).
G.H. Hardy
#63. Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.
A.R. Ammons
#64. That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
H.P. Lovecraft
#65. Poetry is another name for a person's telling of the self, existence and what is beyond, and one's own perceptions.
M. Fethullah Gulen
#67. I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
Adrienne Rich
#68. You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet; because poetry is beyond hooks and holes.
M.F. Moonzajer
#69. A poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind.
James Stephens
#70. Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#71. I think poetry is the only domain where a writer you like can truly be said to influence you, because you read and reread a poem so many times that it simply drills itself into your head.
Michel Houellebecq
#72. But poetry is not to be lived, except for the few to whom it is more important than self-preservation.
Rosamond Lehmann
#73. Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Mary Oliver
#74. Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization
carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language ...
Diane Wakoski
#75. Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.
Edward Hirsch
#76. Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
Ezra Pound
#77. I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
#78. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#79. Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
Story Musgrave
#80. Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.
Mary Stewart
#81. Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#82. Poetry is the gate through which I enter the land of enchantment. Once inside the flaming wall, my limitations fall from me, and my spirit is free.
Helen Keller
#83. I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Robert Morgan
#84. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.
Aristotle.
#85. Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.
Cynthia Ozick
#86. A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.
Philip Larkin
#87. My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.
Marina Tsvetaeva
#88. But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.
Peter Davison
#89. Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.
Wes Nisker
#91. Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Robert Frost
#92. Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
Carl Sandburg
#93. But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.
Thomas Lynch
#94. In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members.
Vladimir Nabokov
#97. Poetry is one of the destinies of speech ... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
Gaston Bachelard
#98. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.
Kenneth Koch
#99. I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
Yehuda Amichai
#100. We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
George Steiner
