Last Updated: September 12, 2022 by Quote.cc Team
Poetry is a form of expression that is often distinctly known because of its use of style and rhythm. It can be said that literature as a tradition started with oral poetry. Poetry is one of the best devices to convey one’s feelings to other people.
Poetry has the power of expression, so poets have always been an essential part of society. The beauty of poetry lies in its simplicity and availability to everyone. Anyone can write beautiful poetry using simple words and expressions that can be spontaneous or planned. Like no strict definition of poetry, even poetry quotes can’t be defined.
Here are some of the poetry quotes you should know as they have been expressed by eminent people from the world of poems and language. These quotes also tell you about the importance of poems.
World Poetry Day is an initiative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It is a day to appreciate and support poets and poetry worldwide. It is held on 21 March each year.
In the USA, National Poetry Month is celebrated every April.
National Poetry Day is held in early October every year in the UK, usually on the first or second Thursday of the month.
130 Quotes About Poetry
Top 10 Poetry Quotes
“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” – William Butler Yeats
“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order; – poetry; the best words in the best order.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“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
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” – Robert Graves
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” – Plato
“Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.” – Mary Oliver
“Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.” – Dylan Thomas
“Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” – Don Marquis
“I would define … the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” – Edgar Allan Poe
“Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere.” – Henry David Thoreau
Famous Poetry Quotes
“Poetry is play. I’d even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.” – Robert Frost
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
“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
“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.” – Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
“Poets aren’t very useful. / Because they aren’t consumeful or very produceful.” – Ogden Nash
“Poetry … is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” – Salvatore Quasimodo
“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
“As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can’t.” – Sylvia Plath
“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
“There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away, / Nor any Coursers like a Page / Of prancing Poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
“The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don’t think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.” – Margaret Atwood
“What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you’re a poet. But there isn’t one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn’t any formula for it.” – Erica Jong
“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” – Gustave Flaubert
“In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.” – Pablo Neruda
“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.” – Bob Dylan
“Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Best Poetry Quotes
“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” – Thomas Hardy
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
“A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.” – Salman Rushdie
“Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.” – Miguel de Cervantes
“Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.” – Samuel Beckett
“Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.” – Robert Frost
“One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.” – Charles Baudelaire
“There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money, either.” – Robert Graves
“Prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough.” – Erica Jong
“The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.” – James Gates Percival
“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to other. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.” – Joy Harjo
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.” – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” – Khalil Gibran
“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.” – Raymond Chandler
Short Poetry Quotes
“Poetry is the deification of reality.” – Edith Sitwell
“Be brief, be buoyant, and be brilliant.” – Brander Matthews
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” – Wallace Stevens
“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.” – Jean Cocteau
“Prose is a museum where all the old weapons of poetry are kept.”
“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” – Oscar Wilde
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” – Rita Dove
“‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.” – Andre Gide
“Poetry is a religion with no hope.” – Jean Cocteau
“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.” – Edgar Allan Poe
“Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.” – John Stuart Mill
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.” – John Wain
Inspirational Poetry Quotes
“Emily DickinsonFor next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.” – Jorge Luis Borges
“There are two ways of disliking poetry. One way is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.” – Oscar Wilde
“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.” – Salvatore Quasimodo
“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.” – G. K Chesterton
“A poet can survive everything but a misprint.” – Oscar Wilde
“I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program.” – Billy Collins
“Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting.” – Simonides
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
“To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.” – Thomas Hardy
“Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.” – A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
“Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.” – Adrienne Rich
“It is a test that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” – T. S. Eliot
“All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’” – Sonia Sanchez
“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” – Sylvia Plath
Romantic Poetry Quotes
“To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.” – Susan Vreeland
“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.” – Carl Sandburg
“Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire
“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul.” – John Keats
“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” – Thomas Gray
“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” – Robert Frost
“Poetry is the only art people haven’t yet learnt to consume like soup.” – W. H. Auden
“Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” – Carl Sandburg
“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.” – John Adams
“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.” – George Sand
“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
“Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.” – Mahmoud Darwish
“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” – T.S. Eliot
“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” – June Jordan
“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” – John Keats
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” – Virginia Woolf
“Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” – Don Marquis
“It was at that age, that poetry came in search of me.” – Pablo Neruda
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” – W.H. Auden
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” – William Wordsworth
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” – T.S. Eliot
“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” – Carl Sandburg
“A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.” – Yevgeny Yentushenko
Persian Poetry Quotes
“Drink wine. This life is eternal. This is all that youth will give you. It is the season for wine, roses, and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” – Omar Khayyam
“This place where you are right now, God circled on a map for you.” – Hafiz
“Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.” – Hafiz
“And now may the blessing of God rest upon all men. I have told unto the Epic of Kings, and the Epic of Kings is to come to a close, and the tale of their deeds is ended.” – Ferdowsi
“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.” – Saadi
“Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.” – Saadi
“I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started to listen to the teaching of my soul.” – Rumi
“But all this world is like a tale we hear; Men’s evil, and their glory disappear.” – Ferdowsi
“Remember, the entrance to the sanctuary is inside you.” – Rumi
“When the belly is empty, the body becomes spirit, and when it is full, the spirit becomes the body.” – Saadi
“Anyone who genuinely and consistently with both hands looks for something, will find it.” – Rumi
“One of the marvels of the world is the sight of a soul sitting in a prison with the key in its hand.” – Rumi
“Those who don’t want to change; let them sleep.” – Rumi
“The words you speak become the house you live in.” – Hafiz
“Yesterday, I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I want to change myself.” – Rumi
“As far as you can avoid it, do not give grief to anyone. Never inflict your rage on another. If you hope for eternal rest, feel this pain yourself, but don’t hurt others.” – Omar Khayyam
“A wealth you cannot imagine flows through you. Do not consider what strangers say. Be secluded in your secret heart-house that bowl of silence.” – Jalaluddin Rumi
“We are people who need to love because love is the soul’s life. Love is simply creation’s greatest joy.” – Hafiz
“Dance until you shatter yourself.” – Rumi
“The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself and everything that you want, you already are.” – Rumi
“Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” – Hafiz
“Sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.” – Rumi
“The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.” – Rumi
“We saw love like seeds in soil.” – Fereydoon Moshiri
“My whole being is a dark chant, which will carry you.” – Forough Farrokhzad
Poetry Quotes On Love
“The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of History.” – Derek Walcott
“Don’t write love poems when you’re in love. Write them when you’re not in love.” – Richard Hugo
“I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.” – Robert Graves
“Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief—everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.” – F. Sionil Jose
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” – W. H. Auden
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” – Robert Frost
Poetry Quotes About Life
“Poetry is life distilled.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning 5 or 6 times.” – Randall Jarrell
“Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.” – Alice Walker
“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” – Robert Frost
“You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.”
“There’s a reason poets often say, ‘Poetry saved my life,’ for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul’s suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estes
