Quotes About Poetry

1. “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,
from an articlein TheNew York Times.

2. “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, from The Devil's Pool.

3. “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, from Ginsberg, A Biography.

4. “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” — Robert

Graves, in response to a questionnaire in Horizon, 1946.

5. “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come

by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” — Thomas
Hardy, as quoted in The Later Years of Thomas Hardy by
Florence Hardy.

6. “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, from The Atlantic, March 1923.
7. “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, from On Axioms and the Surprise of Poetry.

8. “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, from A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays.

9. “It is a test [that] genuine poetry can communicate before it is

understood.” — T. S. Eliot, from the essay "Dante."

10. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it

takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” —
William Wordsworth, from "Preface to Lyrical Ballads."

11. “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the
quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” — William Butler Yeats,
from PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE.

12. "'Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.” — Andre

Gide, from Journals.

13. “I would define ... the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical

Creation of Beauty.” — Edgar Allan Poe, from "The Poetic
Principle."

14. “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, from a speech in New
York, quoted in The New York Times.
15. “A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the
veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a
trifle glaring.” — E. B. White, from One Man's Meat.

16. “The poet is the priest of the invisible.” — Wallace Stevens,

from Opus Posthumous.

17. “A poet can survive everything but a misprint.” — Oscar

Wilde, from The Children of Poets.