Poetry Quotes

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

Anaïs Nin

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

"Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it."

A. E. Housman

"The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

William Faulkner

"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness."

Alice Walker

"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

Audre Lorde

"The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful."

Robert Penn Warren

"Poetry is all nouns and verbs."

Marianne Moore

"So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens."

William Carlos Williams

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

Dennis Gabor

"The crown of literature is poetry."

W. Somerset Maugham

"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."

Adrian Mitchell

"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 Jarrell

"Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week."

Augustus Hare

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

T. S. Eliot

"A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit."

Archibald MacLeish

"All poets are mad."

Robert Burton

"Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a versifier."

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears."

Octavio Paz

"There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing."

John Cage

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness."

John Keats

"My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Not waving but drowning."

Stevie Smith

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."