Top 100 Poetry Poetry Quotes
#1. I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love
Anna Akhmatova
#2. Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.
Ray Bradbury
#3. There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.
Mark Twain
#5. Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.
Hayden Carruth
#6. What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.
Robert Morgan
#7. Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?-then say what you want, it's poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.
Jack Kerouac
#9. When you say, "I fucked up," the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity, and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.
Charles Baxter
#11. The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Robert Morgan
#12. I don't believe in tame poetry ... Poetry busts guts.
Frank Stanford
#13. 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
#14. I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
#16. As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.
Benjamin Disraeli
#17. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
Norman Lock
#18. 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
#22. Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.
Paul Valery
#23. No holy place existed without us then,
no woodland, no dance, no sound.
Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless
days we spent might be made twice as long.
I prayed one word: I want.
Someone, I tell you, will remember us,
even in another time.
Sappho
#24. In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others.
Debasish Mridha
#25. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place
Unknown
#26. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
Jess Walter
#27. 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
#28. I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it.
Allen Tate
#30. We are all instruments pulling the bows across our own lungs. Windmills, still startling in every storm. Have you ever seen a newborn blinking at the light? I wanna do that every day. I wanna know what the kite called itself when it got away, when it escaped into the night ...
Andrea Gibson
#32. It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
#33. Advice to Young Poets
Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head.
Martin Espada
#34. The head's a cloud anchor that the feet must follow. Travel light, he said, or don't travel at all.
Jim Harrison
#35. He tries to find the exit from himself but there is no door.
Dejan Stojanovic
#36. I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
Billy Collins
#37. 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
#38. Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.
Thurston Moore
#39. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#40. I think many people love poetry who don't know they love it. People are sometimes afraid of poetry, or they've been introduced to poetry that doesn't speak to them.
Ellen Bass
#41. Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
#42. Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.
Louis Untermeyer
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
#46. 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
#47. May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
E. E. Cummings
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.
Rhys Ifans
#51. Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.
Joseph Joubert
#52. This world is not enough, but it will have to do. You can either hold on or let go.
Margaret Atwood
#53. There are two kinds of love. One kind you live with, the other you write poetry about.
Debasish Mridha
#54. Poetry reveals that there is no empty space.
Hafez
#55. I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job
Seamus Heaney
#56. this life
has been
a landscape
of pain
and still,
flowers
bloom in it.
Sanober Khan
#57. 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.
#58. 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
#59. Forced relations between two things that superficially appear foreign create a new, instantaneous state. Authentic poetry asks nothing more. A kinship completely nonexistent moments ago was created by the poet's authority, just as it might have been created in life by the authority of chance.
Odysseus Elytis
#60. I have a sickness doctors can't cure,
Inexorably pulling me to the well of my destruction,
Consented to be a sacrifice, killed for her love,
Eager, like the drunk gulping wine mixed with poison,
Shameless were those my nights,
Yet my soul loved them beyond all passion.
Ibn Hazm
#61. Inebriate of Air - am I
And Debauchee of Dew
Reeling - thro endless summer days
From Inns of Molten Blue -
Emily Dickinson
#62. Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude
they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.
Herb Elliott
#63. He wanted to be a poet,' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.
Nora Roberts
#64. Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?
Christina Rossetti
#65. A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things which in a sense do not exist till they are born ... in poetry.
Cecil Day-Lewis
#66. 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
#67. Steep fall to the ground
shattering
like clay pigeons
missed
by bad shots
and unsteady hands.
Jessica Kristie
#69. I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
David Knopfler
#70. 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
#71. Screw poetry, it's you I want, your taste, rain on you, mouth on your skin.
Margaret Atwood
#72. The Net
I made you many and many a song,
Yet never one told all you are
It was as though a net of words
Were flung to catch a star;
It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea.
Sara Teasdale
#73. Linear's defeated form
The intangible reality rise.' ~ Wanderer
Stella Coulson
#74. keep following your heart.
it won't always be easy, but it'll be the most important thing you'll do.
AVA.
#75. And take back ill-polished stanzas to the anvil.
Horace
#76. So goes the hard way- the (fall a)part way-the (break a) heart way.
Kami Garcia
#77. The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.
Teresa Palmer
#78. This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me
Walt Whitman
#80. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#82. Following dark winter's strife, a warm air rises, teemed with life. Birth, rebirth, as the waiting die. Old love, new love sprouts wings to fly.
Phar West Nagle
#83. 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
#84. your smile.
is the ultimate
golden dream.
all the poems
in the world
are waking up from.
Sanober Khan
#85. In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.
Ted Hughes
#86. There is no poetry or song.
There is no short or long.
There is only you.
Debasish Mridha
#87. I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters,
but I always seem to lay us out bare.
Sorry for the poems.
Unknown
#88. Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
Dylan Thomas
#89. People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
#90. That was not sex. That was naked poetry.
Hank Moody
#91. You're my story,
you're my poetry,
you're my flower
you're my deep driving desire.
Debasish Mridha
#92. But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#93. Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action.
Raoul Vaneigem
#94. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
#96. If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.
Luis Gonzalez
#97. 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
#98. What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
Czeslaw Milosz
#99. Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.
Mahmoud Darwish
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
