Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy:—in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement… says heaven and earth in one word… speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
—Christopher Fry (1907–2005) English Poet, Playwright
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Poet, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
—Edmund Burke (1729–97) British Philosopher, Statesman
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
—Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American Novelist, Essayist
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
—Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American Biographer, Novelist, Socialist
A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.
—Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese-born American Philosopher, Poet, Painter, Theologian, Sculptor
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
—Diane Ackerman (b.1948) American Poet, Essayist, Naturalist
Poets are all who love and feel great truths, and tell them.
—Gamaliel Bailey (1807–59) American Journalist
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth which God has set in all men’s souls.
—James Russell Lowell (1819–91) American Poet, Critic
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian Poet
The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth; for all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of a face; and true proportions the beauty of architecture; as true measures that of harmony and music. In poetry, which is all fable, truth still is the perfection.
—Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83) British Statesman
No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.
—William Temple (1881–1944) British Clergyman, Theologian
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
—John Ciardi (1916–86) American Poet, Teacher, Etymologist, Translator
The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.
—Stephane Mallarme (1842–98) French Symbolist Poet
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
—Socrates (469BCE–399BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
—Northrop Frye
The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
—Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British Poet, Literary Critic
A person born with an instinct for poverty.
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American Writer, Publisher, Artist, Philosopher
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
—Billy Collins (b.1941) American Poet
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
—James Fenton
Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.
—Edmund Burke (1729–97) British Philosopher, Statesman
We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.
—John Fowles (1926–2005) English Novelist
It is 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 (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
The poet, whether in prose or verse, the creator, can only stamp his images forcibly on the page, in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English Philosopher
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
—Thomas Gray (1716–71) English Poet, Book Collector
Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning; he used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80) American Poet, Writer
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 (1795–1821) English Poet
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) English Writer, Poet
Only poetry inspires poetry.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Poets are never young in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel toward for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–94) American Physician, Essayist
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
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 (1772–1834) English Poet, Literary Critic, Philosopher
Poetry, good sir, in my opinion, is like a tender virgin, very young, and extremely beautiful, whom divers others virgins—namely, all the other sciences—make it their business to enrich, polish and adorn; and to her it belongs to make use of them all, and on her part to give a lustre to them all.
—Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish Novelist
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
Poetry is the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
—Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American Biographer, Novelist, Socialist
Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
A poet must needs be before his own age, to be even with posterity.
—James Russell Lowell (1819–91) American Poet, Critic
Superstition is the poetry of life, so that it does not injure the poet to be superstitious.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Poet, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist
The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.
—Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-American Novelist