The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
—Don Marquis (1878–1937) American Humorist, Journalist, Author
There are so many tender and holy emotions flying about in our inward world, which, like angels, can never assume the body of an outward act; so many rich and lovely flowers spring up which bear no seed, that it is a happiness poetry was invented, which receives into its limbus all those incorporeal spirits, and the perfume of all these flowers.
—Jean Paul (1763–1825) German Novelist, Humorist
A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents.
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American Poet, Novelist, Cultural Historian
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
—Novalis (1772–1801) German Romantic Poet, Novelist
As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language against corruption. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear and this leads to violence.
—W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
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
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
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
Every old poem is sacred.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
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
This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau’s Ode To Posterity
—Voltaire (1694–1778) French Philosopher, Author
If the grain were separated from the chaff which fills the works of our national poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in the proportion of a mole-hill to a mountain.
—Edmund Burke (1729–97) British Philosopher, Statesman
Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feeling, revives the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the spring time of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and, through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English Poet, Literary Critic, Philosopher
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
—Sylvia Plath (1932–63) American Poet, Novelist
A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.
—Jules Renard (1864–1910) French Writer, Diarist
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
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
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.
—Stephen Spender (1909–95) English Poet, Critic
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
I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks… or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don’t bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.
—Allen Ginsberg (1926–97) American Poet, Activist
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
—Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian Novelist
We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry.—It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
—W. H. Auden (1907–73) British-born American Poet, Dramatist
Poetry is itself a thing of God.—He made his prophets poets; and the more we feel of poesie do we become like God in love and power.
—Gamaliel Bailey (1807–59) American Journalist
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
—William Shenstone (1714–63) British Poet, Landscape Gardener
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
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 (1914–53) Welsh Poet, Author
The truth, I am convinced, is that there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds, that moral, political, and physical science have entirely withdrawn from poetry the attention of all whose attention is worth having; and that the poetical reading public being composed of the mere dregs of the intellectual community, the most sufficing passport to their favour must rest on the mixture of a little easily-intelligible portion of mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.
—Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) English Satirist, Novelist, Author
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.
—Voltaire (1694–1778) French Philosopher, Author
The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but to those who need it.
—Unknown
All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) French Novelist, Playwright, Short Story Writer
Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
—Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish Novelist, Poet, Playwright, Lawyer
The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
He who finds elevated and lofty pleasure in the feeling of poetry is a true poet, though he never composed a line of verse in his entire lifetime.
—George Sand (1804–76) French Novelist, Dramatist
When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.
—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) American-born British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian Poet
Poetry should only occupy the idle.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80) American Poet, Writer
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
—Denis Diderot (1713–84) French Philosopher, Writer
We must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquility” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) American-born British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
As nightingales feed on glow worms, so poets live upon the living light of nature and beauty.
—Gamaliel Bailey (1807–59) American Journalist
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet