875 Poetry Quotes to share with friends and relatives

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. – Edmund Burke

Lyres are placid in the hands of poets; but the true lyre is the poet himself. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. – Robert Frost

Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. – William Blissett

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more? – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers

Happiness is sharing a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry with a shade tree. – Terri Guillemets, “From the Library to the Park,” 1993

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. – Author Unknown

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. – Robert Frost

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. – Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 1957

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape. – J. Patrick Lewis, www.jpatricklewis.com

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. – James Tate

[I]t is not health, it is convalescence that is poetical. Just as certain plants only yield all their fragrance to the fingers that crush them, so it is only in a state of suffering that certain affections utter all their poetry. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. – T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

[Poetry] feeds on the purest substance of the sentiments of the soul. It quenches its thirst with a nectar that has no dregs. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)

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, New York Times, 17 February 1957

[T]rue poets… can pierce through the clouds to the light, and save the purity of their inspiration from the general disorder. It is refreshing to read them, delightful to steep ourselves in their truthful poetry. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin. – Edmond de Goncourt

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. – Robinson Jeffers

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. – Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Poetry is creative; to be a poet is to remake the universe. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)