Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.-Carl Sandburg
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.-David Carradine
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.-Jean Cocteau
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.-Leonard Cohen
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.-Rita Dove
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. – Paul Valery
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.-Robert Frost
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.-Charles Simic
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.-Octavio Paz
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.-William Wordsworth
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 is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.-Salvatore Quasimodo
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.-Plutarch
There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.-Robert Graves
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.-Edgar Allan Poe
Always be a poet, even in prose. – Charles Baudelaire
Poetry: the best words in the best order.-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.-W. H. Auden
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.-Muriel Rukeyser
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
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.-William Hazlitt
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.-Robert Frost
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.-John Ciardi
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T. S. Eliot
Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.-Allen Ginsberg
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.-John Cage
The moment of change is the only poem.-Adrienne Rich
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.-Johann Georg Hamann
God is the perfect poet.-Robert Browning
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.-Gilbert K. Chesterton
Poetry is the deification of reality.-Edith Sitwell
The crown of literature is poetry.-W. Somerset Maugham
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.-Thomas Gray
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet. – Bob Dylan
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.-Emily Dickinson
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.-Steven Wright
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
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.-John Fowles
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.-Marianne Moore
Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.-Dennis Gabor
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.-Carl Sandburg
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
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.-Robert Frost
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. – Novalis
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.-Rainer Maria Rilke
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.-Joseph Joubert
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.-Paul Dirac
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.-T. S. Eliot
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.-Robert Penn Warren
If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.-M. H. Abrams
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.-Khalil Gibran
What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.-Soren Kierkegaard
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.-Wallace Stevens
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
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. – Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.-John Keats
‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.-Andre Gide
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