A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense. – Thomas Harrison
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life. – Robert Penn Warren
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. – Charles Simic
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 read poetry to save time. – Marilyn Monroe
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance. – Robert Frost
Wine is bottled poetry. – Robert Louis Stevenson
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. – Edgar Allan Poe
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
Superstition is the poetry of life. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. – Charles Baudelaire
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince. – H. L. Mencken
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. – T. S. Eliot
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry. – Bertrand Russell
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both. – Victor Hugo
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter. – Victor Hugo
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. – William Wordsworth
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 should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. – T. S. Eliot
