Poetry Quotes
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.Adrian Mitchell
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
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.Percy Bysshe Shelley
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.Mario Cuomo
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.Charles Simic
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.Oscar Wilde
Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.Beverly Nichols
It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.Boris Pasternak
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.Charles Baudelaire
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901)
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream - A scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows - Is essentially poetry.Jesse Louis Jackson
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight with a verse given in a happy quotation than in the poem.Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest to reach true perfection.E. C. Stedman
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.Jean Cocteau
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.Simonides
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
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
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.Martin Luther King, Jr.
Marty This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.This Is Spinal Tap
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - But not without poetry.Charles Baudelaire
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.Thomas Carlyle
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.M. C. Richards
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.Martin Luther King, Jr.
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.R. Z. Sheppard, book critic
There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money either.Robert Graves
We have more poets thatnjudges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem that to understand a good one.Michel de Montaigne
Through and through the world is infested with quantity. To talk sense is to talk quantities, It is no use saying the nation is large - How large? It is no use s aying that radium is scarce - How scarce? You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.Alfred North Whitehead
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.Edward Hubbell Chaplin
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.John Adams
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
What is important - what lasts - In another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.Peter Brodie
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.T. S. Eliot
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.Emily Dickinson
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.Lewis Thomas
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.Havelock Ellis
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.Stephen Leacock, 1912
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.William Wordsworth
