Poetry Quotes

"Poetry makes nothing happen."

W. H. Auden

"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks."

Simonides

"Poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history."

"Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind."

Maxwell Bodenheim

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry."

Muriel Rukeyser

"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

"Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth."

June Jordan

"Poetry is a sort of homecoming."

Paul Celan

"Poetry is an act of peace."

Pablo Neruda

"Poetry is the deification of reality."

Edith Sitwell

"Poetry is the language of a state of crisis."

Stéphane Mallarmé

"A good poem is a contribution to reality."

Dylan Thomas

"You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words."

Stéphane Mallarmé

"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge."

William Wordsworth

"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

Marianne Moore

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."

Novalis

"Poetry is not a luxury."

Audre Lorde

"A poem should not mean But be."

Archibald MacLeish

"Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Poetry is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake."

Lord Byron

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either."

Robert Graves

"Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is."

James Branch Cabell

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

Charles Baudelaire

"Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush."

Wallace Stevens