There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. – Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
[P]oetry often brings consolation to the heart which prose has failed to touch… – Luigi, Sweet Songs for Mourning Mothers, 1884
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. – Leonard Cohen
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. – Khalil Gibran
Poetry is what gets lost in translation. – Robert Frost
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, 1851
Always be a poet, even in prose. – Charles Baudelaire, “My Heart Laid Bare,” Intimate Journals, 1864
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. – Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone
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 Considered
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. – Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. – W.B. Yeats
Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. – Carl Sandburg
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. – John Keats
A poet can survive anything but a misprint. – Oscar Wilde
True poets are those who have received from God, together with the gift of expression, the power of penetrating further than others into the things of the heart and the life. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
The poet illuminates us by the flames in which his being passes away. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, “Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.” – Robert Penn Warren, “The Themes of Robert Frost,” Hopwood Lecture, 1947
A poem begins with a lump in the throat. – Robert Frost
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers
