Poetry Quotes

"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth."

Jean Cocteau

"Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for."

Jean Cocteau

"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing."

Edmund Burke

"With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion."

Edgar Allan Poe

"A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."

Percy Bysshe Shelley

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

Robert Graves

"Poetry's a mere drug, sir."

George Farquhar

"All poetry is putting the infinite within the finite."

Robert Browning

"The poet is the priest of the invisible."

Wallace Stevens

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

G. K. Chesterton

"If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone."

Thomas Hardy

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

"Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad, and if you're not certain, try it on the cat."

Osbert Sitwell

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."

"Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."

"Poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."

Rita Dove

"Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind."

Allen Ginsberg

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions."

William Hazlitt

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too."

"The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity."

"Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning."

Dana Gioia

"Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense."

Isaac Barrow