Observe National Poetry Month with this inspiring collection of poem quotations...
- "With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books."
-- Peter Abrahams - "It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."
-- W. H. Auden - "What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? "
-- W.H. Auden - "Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician . . . or else it is nothing, an empty, formalised bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. "
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald - "It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully."
-- Aristotle - "The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice."
-- Earle Birney - "Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. "
-- William Blissett - "For me, poetry is an impish attempt to paint the colour of the wind."
-- Maxwell Bodenheim - "Poetry is life distilled. "
-- Gwendolyn Brooks - "God is the perfect poet. "
-- Robert Browning - "Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."
-- Edmund Burke - "Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth-the true poet is very near the oracle."
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin - "A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. "
-- Rene Char - "You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. "
-- John Ciardi - "The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. "
-- Jean Cocteau - "Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie. "
-- Jean Cocteau - "A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. "
-- Jean Cocteau - "The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth."
-- Jean Cocteau - "Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. "
-- Rita Dove - "Poetry is not a profession, it is a destiny."
-- Mikhail Dudan
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- "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 - "Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. "
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - "Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."
-- Paul Engle - "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 - "A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself."
-- E.M. Forster - "[P]oets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. "
-- Sigmund Freud - "[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
-- Robert Frost - "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."
-- Robert Frost - "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. "
-- Robert Frost - "Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books."
-- Robert Frost - "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."
-- Robert Frost - "To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."
-- Robert Frost - "Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things."
-- Robert Frost - "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. "
-- Robert Frost - "The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. "
-- Robert Frost - "Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. "
-- Thomas Gray - "If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow. "
-- Terri Guillemets - "Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. "
-- William Hazlitt - "Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart. "
-- Thomas Hill - "When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes - "A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."
-- Randall Jarell - "Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. "
-- Robinson Jeffers - "Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth."
-- Samuel Johnson - "You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you."
-- Joseph Joubert
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- "The poetry of the earth is never dead."
-- John Keats - "A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul."
-- Soren Kierkegaard - "He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. "
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton - "A poem should not mean But be."
-- Archibald MacLeish - "My favorite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something."
-- Groucho Marx - "The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. "
-- W. Somerset Maugham - "Poetry is all nouns and verbs."
-- Marianne Moore - "The courage of the Poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness."
-- Christopher Morley - "Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. "
-- Alfred de Musset - "Poets arent very useful Because they aren't consumeful or produceful."
-- Ogden Nash - "I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. "
-- Pablo Neruda - "What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive."
-- Arnold Palmer - "For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."
-- Sylvia Plath - "With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."
-- Edgar Allan Poe - "Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."
-- Edgar Allan Poe - "The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. "
-- Edgar Allan Poe - "Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry."
-- Muriel Rukeyser - "Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment."
-- Carl Sandburg - "Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child."
-- Carl Sandburg - "Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."
-- Carl Sandburg - "I've written some poetry I don't understand myself."
-- Carl Sandburg - "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."
-- Carl Sandburg
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- "I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me."
-- Edith Södergran - "A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. "
-- Wallace Stevens - "In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."
-- Wallace Stevens - "The poet is the priest of the invisible."
-- Wallace Stevens - "Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. "
-- Allen Tate - "A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
-- Dylan Thomas - "You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. "
-- Dylan Thomas - "The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. "
-- Lionel Trilling - "If the author had said "Let's us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. "
-- Unknown - "The job of the poet is to render the world-to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do."
-- Mark Van Doren - "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 light by which we may see - and what we see is life. "
-- Robert Penn Warren - "A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. "
-- E.B. White - "He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. "
-- Oscar Wilde - "Who can tell the dancer from the dance? "
-- William Butler Yeats - "A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."
-- Yevgeny Yentushenko
98 Poets Read Their Work (1888-2006) by Various Artists
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