Enjoy this collection of quotes on Poetry.
“Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.” – Christopher Fry
“Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.” – Carl Sandburg
“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.” – Samuel Johnson
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” – Plato
“When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” – John F. Kennedy
“The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse… the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” – Aristotle
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” – Aristotle
“Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature.” – Augustus William Hare
“Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.” – Georges Brague
“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.” – Muriel Rukeyser
“Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.” – James Branch Cabell
“I don’t create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.” – Edith Södergran
“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 is the art of substantiating shadows.” – Edmund Burke
“Poetry is life distilled.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” – Thomas Gray
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert Frost
“Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.” – Robinson Jeffers
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.” – Wallace Stevens
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” – Novalis
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” – Khalil Gibran
“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.” – Jim Morrison
“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” – Salman Rushdie
“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
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.” — Wallace Stevens
“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” – Percy Shelley
“Poetry is an act of peace.” – Pablo Neruda
“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“There is often as much poetry between the lines of a poem as in those lines.” – Alexandre Vinet
“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.” – Stephen Mallarme
“The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” – Jean Cocteau
“If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.” – Derek Walcott
“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” – Robert Frost
“I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.” – Carl Sandburg
“A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” – Randall Jarrell
“The poet illuminates us by the flames in which his being passes away.” – Alexandre Vinet
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – Leonard Cohen
“The poem… is a little myth of man’s capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.” – Robert Penn Warren
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” – Robert Frost
“In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand must spring from the commonplace…. All that remains for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world.” – Alexandre Vinet
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.” – John Keats
“Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.” – James Tate
“I write poetry in order to live more fully.” – Judith Rodriguez
“If you’ve got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow.” – Terri Guillemets
“Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire
“If you can’t be a poet, be the poem.” – David Carradine
“Every single soul is a poem.” – Michael Franti
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” – Muriel Rukeyser
“I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don’t have to write anymore.” – Tukaram
“God is the perfect poet.” – Robert Browning
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” – Paul Valéry
“Poetry is not always words.” – Terri Guillemets
Read more in The Essential Collection Of Quotes On Creativity.