| Quote 168 | A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. |
| Quote 173 | A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. |
| Quote 213 | Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. |
| Quote 220 | A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to slee... |
| Quote 257 | Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. |
| Quote 368 | A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. |
| Quote 461 | All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
- Oscar Wilde |
| Quote 511 | Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. |
| Quote 532 | Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. |
| Quote 557 | A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery |
| Quote 771 | Always be a poet, even in prose.
- Charles Baudelaire |
| Quote 800 | A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. |
| Quote 919 | Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. |
| Quote 980 | Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. |
| Quote 1394 | A poet can survive everything but a misprint. |
| Quote 2327 | Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. |
| Quote 2976 | The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. |
| Quote 3585 | A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. |
| Quote 3744 | A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. |
| Quote 3825 | Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. |
| Quote 4024 | Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personalit... |
| Quote 4415 | Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extin... |
| Quote 4877 | Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
- Robert Frost |
| Quote 7611 | Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
- Novalis |
| Quote 7661 | Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems. |
| Quote 7770 | God is the perfect poet.
- Robert Browning |
| Quote 7852 | Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly. |
| Quote 7941 | Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. |
| Quote 8176 | The moment of change is the only poem.
- Adrienne Rich |
| Quote 8226 | To have great poets, there must be great audiences. |
| Quote 8264 | Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
- Charles Baudelaire |
| Quote 8296 | The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
- Jean Cocteau |
| Quote 8327 | There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. |
| Quote 8403 | There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. |
| Quote 8407 | To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears. |
| Quote 8552 | Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. |
| Quote 8645 | A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances. |
| Quote 8696 | Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. |
| Quote 8715 | Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. |
| Quote 8728 | I still read Donne, particularly his love poems. |
| Quote 8848 | You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words. |
| Quote 8990 | The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. |
| Quote 9068 | Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. |
| Quote 9206 | We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words. |
| Quote 9366 | Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
- Carl Sandburg |
| Quote 9558 | Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. |
| Quote 9570 | No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results? |
| Quote 9620 | A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense. |
| Quote 9723 | If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. |
| Quote 10144 | You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. |
| Quote 10223 | I like poems that are little games.
- Peter Davison |
| Quote 10282 | Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. |
| Quote 10352 | Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. |
| Quote 10367 | Every single soul is a poem.
- Michael Franti |
| Quote 10541 | One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. |
| Quote 10593 | Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. |
| Quote 10720 | Poetry: the best words in the best order.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
| Quote 10792 | Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. |
| Quote 10914 | If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. |
| Quote 10971 | Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. |
| Quote 10978 | However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. |
| Quote 11159 | Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. |
| Quote 11368 | Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. |
| Quote 11383 | Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. |
| Quote 11442 | Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. |
| Quote 11476 | Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. |
| Quote 11537 | How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. |
| Quote 11593 | If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
- David Carradine |
| Quote 11688 | The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. |
| Quote 11722 | Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. |
| Quote 12094 | Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel. |
| Quote 12319 | "Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. |
| Quote 12355 | Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. |
| Quote 12610 | No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers. |
| Quote 13033 | I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything. |
| Quote 13048 | He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. |
| Quote 13063 | The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. |
| Quote 13134 | A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties. |
| Quote 13274 | Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the ... |
| Quote 13402 | The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair. |
| Quote 13761 | To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. |
| Quote 13763 | There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. |
| Quote 13800 | Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. |
| Quote 13843 | Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. |
| Quote 13847 | You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. |
| Quote 13868 | The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a ... |
| Quote 13954 | You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble. |