Poetry By Poets Quotes:

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

- T. S. Eliot

topic: Communication, Writing, Poetry, Waste Land, Poetry By Poets

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.

- Maya Angelou

topic: Love, Inspirational, Life, Hurdling Obstacles, Inspiring Love

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

- Carl Sandburg

source: Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.317, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Writing, Animal, Air, Great Poet, Poetry By Poets

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

- T. S. Eliot

topic: Art, Mean, Expression, What Is Poetry, Individual Talent

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

- William Wordsworth

source: Lyrical Ballads 2nd ed., preface (1802) See Dorothy Parker 24

topic: Powerful, Poetry, Feelings, Overflow, Great Poet

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

- David Carradine

source: Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

topic: Inspirational, Life, Being Yourself, Best Poetry, True To Oneself

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

- Robert Frost

topic: Expression, Effort, Emotion, Great Poet, Lump In The Throat

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

- Dennis Gabor

topic: Heart, Poetry, Poetry Is, Great Poet, Poetry By Poets

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

topic: Life, Poetry, World, Legislators, Capers

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

- Paul Engle

source: New York Times, February 17, 1957.

topic: Ideas, Poetry, Skins, Tough Skin, Power Of Language

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

- T. S. Eliot

topic: Immature, Different, Stealing, Mature And Immature, Writing Poetry

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

topic: Funny Inspirational, Food, Poetry, Delicious Food, Great Poet

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

- Emily Dickinson

topic: Taken, Writing, Poetry, Great Poet, Emily

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

- Robert Frost

topic: Inspiration, Poetry, Delight, Momentary, Clarification

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

- Robin Williams

topic: Life, Romance, Alive, What Is Poetry, Wedding Speech

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

source: 1850 Poems,'Sonnets from the Portuguese', sonnet 43.

topic: Love, Sight, Grace, Marriage Ceremony, Writing Poems

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

- Robert Frost

topic: Ice, Forever, Poetry, Stoves, Poetry By Poets

I've had it with these cheap sons of ***** who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.

- Kenneth Rexroth

topic: Book, Son, Love Poetry, Great Poet, Poetry By Poets

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

- Christopher Morley

source: Christopher Morley (1925). “Forty-four Essays by Christopher Morley”

topic: Courage, Art, Doors, Poetry By Poets

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

- Leonard Cohen

topic: Writing, Poetry, Burning, Great Poet, Best Poetry

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost

source: "The Road Not Taken" l. 16 (1916)

topic: Inspirational, Happiness, Success, Different Roads, Journey And Destination

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 sleep.

- Salman Rushdie

topic: Courage, Sleep, Names, Going To Sleep, Poetry By Poets

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

- John Keats

source: Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 238

topic: Inspirational, Reading Poetry, Remembrance, Singularity, Wording

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

topic: Writing, Order, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Best Poem

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

- Don Marquis

source: Don Marquis, William McCollum (1982). “Selected letters of Don Marquis”, Northwoods Pr

topic: Education, Learning, Knowledge, Poetry By Poets, Poetry Reading

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

- Allen Ginsberg

topic: Time, Lying, Party, What Is Poetry, Poetry By Famous Poets

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

- Wallace Stevens

topic: Poetry, Invisible, Poet, Poetry By Poets, Great Poetry

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

- Robert Frost

topic: Love, Life, Writing, Lovesickness, Lump In The Throat

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

- Robin Williams

source: "Fictional character: John Keating". "Dead Poets Society", www.imdb.com. 1989.

topic: Cute, Writing, Carpe Diem, Dead Poets, Dead Poets Society

Law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

- Tom Schulman

source: "Dead Poets Society". www.imdb.com. 1989.

topic: Engineering, Law, Romance, What Is Poetry, Wedding Speech