We don’t know what exact magic is carried by a rhyming sequence of words, but no one would ever deny that it is just there. Something truly majestic happens when you take some words, rhyme them, hide a deeper meaning between the lines, and then share those delicious words with like-minded people. It’s like the same bland words shine anew, and even such a simple word as a potato might now sound like something ethereal, meaningful, and purely awe-inspiring. However, as you can see, our thesis on poetry is a bit simplistic, so why don’t we check out what some slightly more experienced people had to say about this phenomenon of language? A good place to start analyzing the power of the verse would be, of course, our list of the most interesting poetry quotes that we’ve gathered from all around the internet.
So, what should you expect from these smart quotes? Well, for starters, they will try to reveal the true impact that poetry has on people. And here we thought it was something unexplainable, like magic! Then, the very same poetry quotes, while doing their job of explaining, might ignite a certain kind of fire in you, one that burns for rhyming and hidden meanings. Don’t say that we didn’t warn you! And all you have to do is to read our selection of the best quotes on poetry.
Are you ready, dear poetry connoisseurs? If so, scroll down below and check out the beautiful and inspiring quotes in our list. Give your vote for the most touching quotes and share this article with your friends. Yes, even those who have never read a poem in their lives!
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"Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." ― John Keats
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote." ― Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory." ― Philip Levine
“You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.“ ― Charles Olson
“Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.“ ― Carl Sandburg
"A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression." ― Fyodor Dostoevsky
"In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you." ― Abbas Kiarostami
“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” ― Vincent Willem van Gogh
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.“ ― Aristotle
“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
“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
“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.“ ― Edgar Allan Poe
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.“ ― Leonard Cohen
“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
“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.“ ― Bob Dylan
“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
“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.“ ― W. H. Auden
“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.“ ― Octavio Paz
"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality." ― James Joyce
"We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words." ― John Fowles
"You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone." ― John Ciardi
"A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties." ― Anne Stevenson
"A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away." ― Ivan Turgenev
"If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone." ― Thomas Hardy
"The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do." ― Mark Van Doren
“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.“ ― Charles Baudelaire
“Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.“ ― Alice Walker
"Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future." ― David Whyte
"I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up." ― Keith Haring
"Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life." ― John Betjeman
“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.” ― Cassandra Clare
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” ― Plato
“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.” ― Kahlil Gibran
“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” ― Charles Darwin
“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
“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
“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.“ ― Jim Morrison
“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
“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 an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.“ ― Charles Simic
“He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.“ ― George Sand
“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 poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself." ― E. M. Forster
"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." ― Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure." ― Mark Strand
"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 the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment." ― Carl Sandburg
"It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page." ― Howard Nemerov
“The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.“ ― Seamus Heaney
“Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.“ ― Alfred de Musset
“When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.“ ― Muhammad Iqbal
"Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art." ― Thomas Hardy
"In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life." ― Jonas Mekas
"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing." ― Edmund Burke
"In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty." ― Seamus Heaney
"Poetry isn't a profession, it's a way of life. It's an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that." ― Mary Oliver
"Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals." ― Sylvia Plath
"There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired." ― Edward Young
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” ― Robert Frost
“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.” ― Rick Riordan
“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.“ ― Khalil Gibran
“Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.” ― Greg Bear
“Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.“ ― A. E. Housman
“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
"When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images." ― Niels Bohr
"Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully." ― William Cullen Bryant
"One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose." ― Voltaire
"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
"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
"A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances." ― Douglas Dunn
"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted." ― Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems." ― John Barton
“I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.“ ― Pablo Neruda
"Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear." ― Ellen Hopkins
"Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance." ― F. Sionil Jose
"Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down." ― Mahmoud Darwish
"Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it's always been the language of bridges." ― Amanda Gorman
"When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else." ― Joy Harjo
"How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?" ― Maria Montessori
“If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.” ― Seamus Heaney
“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
"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
"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses." ― Jean Cocteau
"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." ― William Butler Yeats
