112+ Best Poetry Quotes By Famous Poets

Poetry is a reflection of the expression of emotions. Poetry can reveal all the beauty in a powerful language. It is the job of successful and notable poets to bring readers into the magical world of poetry. With thought provoking and inspirational poetry quotes, you will find something from yourself and get inspiration which can make a big difference.

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Poetry Quotes

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

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning. — Maya Angelou

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. —Emily Dickinson

It was at that age, that poetry came in search of me. — Pablo Neruda

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. — Thomas Hardy

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. — Robert Frost

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

There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk. — Charles Baudelaire

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down. — Mahmoud Darwish

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. — Paul Engle

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. — William Shakespeare

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. — Carl Sandburg

All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better. — Sonia Sanchez

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. — Novalis

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool. But you yourself may prove to show it, Every fool is not a poet. — Alexander Pope

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. — Christopher Fry

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. — T.S. Eliot

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. — Thomas Gray

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does. — Allen Ginsberg

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it. — Rumi

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness. — Seamus Heaney

I’m a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I’d rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program. —Billy Collins

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. — Robert Graves

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life. — Matthew Arnold

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. — William Butler Yeats

Poetry is perfect verbs hunting for elusive nouns. — J. Patrick Lewis

The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. — Allen Ginsberg

Poetry implies the whole truth; philosophy expresses only a particle of it. — Henry David Thoreau

Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. — Maxwell Bodenheim

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. — Oscar Wilde

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is indispensable –if I only knew what for. — Jean Cocteau

Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside. — Billy Collins

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs. — Charles Baudelaire

We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen. — Fleur Adcock

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty. — Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. — Pablo Neruda

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure. — Billy Collins

There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either. — Robert Graves

Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference. — Philip Larkin

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness. — James Gates Percival

Poetry gives us permission. It reminds us that we are loved, and we are human. Its rhythms are those of the heartbeat. Its rhymes lure us into remembering more than we ever imagine. It’s a form of song, with a quieter tune. — Molly Fisk

Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes. — Henry David Thoreau

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. — Charles Simic

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. — Mark Strand

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. — Khalil Gibran

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. — W. H. Auden

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. — Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance. — John Keats

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. — William Wordsworth

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. — Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry’s job is to discover wholeness and create wholeness, including the wholeness of the fragmentary and the broken. — Jane Hirschfield

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. — John Keats

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. — T. S. Eliot

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. — Robert Frost

Poetry exists to extend human consciousness, to bring materials and insights from the unconscious dark into the light of language, — Donald Hall

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. — Joyce Kilmer

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning. — Stanley Kunitz

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. — Audre Lorde

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance. — Matthew Arnold

Powerful Quotes About Poetry From Notable Poets

• Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. — Carl Sandburg
• Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. — William Wordsworth
• What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry. — G. K Chesterton
• Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. — Dylan Thomas
• Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling . . .. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually – that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too, but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling. — Muriel Rukeyser
• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim land of peace’. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realising that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. — Ezra Pound
• 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 who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. — T.S. Eliot
• Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. — W.H. Auden
• Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere. — Henry David Thoreau
• Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. — Samuel Beckett
• When I was little, my dad told me about Anandpur Sahib and the court of Guru Gobind Singh. That we came from a tradition of poets, warriors and artists who created when it was illegal to create… we’re groomed to be reckless in the defense of what we feel is right. — Rupi Kaur
• You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough. — Erica Jong
• In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So, it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes. — Basho
• Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. —Don Marquis
• Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. — Roald Dahl
• A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — W. H. Auden
• 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
• What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry. — G. K Chesterton
• Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.’ — Sylvia Plath
• The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. — Edgar Allan Poe
• Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision – a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed. — Mary Oliver
• Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 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
• A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep. — Salman Rushdie
• Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty. — Edward Hirsch
• I have always thought of poems as steppingstones in one’s own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies you’re going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next steppingstone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. — Seamus Heaney
• Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life. — William Rose Benet
• Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world. — Wallace Stevens
• Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world. — Miguel de Cervantes
• I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman. — Robert Graves
• Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. — Plato
• Poetry can magnify experience. — May Swenson
• Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. — Leonard Cohen
• Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face – Poets alone should kiss and tell. — Dorothy Parker
• Poetry and music are very good friends. Like mommies and daddies and strawberries and cream – they go together. — Nikki Giovanni
• What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you’re a poet. But there isn’t one