Poetry Quotes

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

R. Z. Sheppard, book critic

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

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Oscar Wilde

Poetry is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

Lord Byron

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

M. C. Richards

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

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 and say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.

L. Schefe

Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Beverly Nichols

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Thomas Carlyle

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, In "Apology, " sct. 21, by Plato.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Bertrand Russell

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Havelock Ellis

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

John Masefield

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.

Edward Hubbell Chaplin

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Robert Frost

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo

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.

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

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

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

Frederick William Robertson

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

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

John Ruskin

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

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

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