Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. – Gustave Flaubert
In poetry and in eloquence the beautiful and grand must spring from the commonplace…. All that remains for us is to be new while repeating the old, and to be ourselves in becoming the echo of the whole world. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. – Thomas Babington Macaulay
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
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. – Allen Tate
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. – Joseph Joubert
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. – Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. – Carl Sandburg
Poetry is never abandoned, it is only remixed. – James Schwartz
“Most poems are never finished,” (I was defensive). He sighed: “No, most poems are never started.” – Dr.SunWolf, professorsunwolf.com
Poetry is reverie on paper. – Terri Guillemets, “Quiet time with my soul,” 1998
The poet needs to admire; he is in a merely human sense the high priest of the true, the beautiful, the grand. On whatever side he spreads his wings it is his mission to bear the universal homage to these worthy objects, or to some ideas of them. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
Poetry is life distilled. – Gwendolyn Brooks
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. – Oscar Wilde
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. – Robert Frost
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. – William Hazlitt
Poetry is the tunnel at the end of the light. – J. Patrick Lewis, www.jpatricklewis.com
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. – E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
[T]he poetic soul… a living lyre, it only lives enough to echo, and all that it has of life it pours out, and spends in song: the inspiring tripod which the poet ascends, at once unites him to, and separates him from, society. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
