Poets touch forcibly and truly that invisible lyre which echoes in unison in all human souls. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847), paraphrase
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. – Jean Cocteau
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue! – Jean Cocteau
[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom. – Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appall them if it did. – Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe
The ugly is in poetry only a passing shadow. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
A sold poem loses half its meaning. – Terri Guillemets
My chief aim is to make a poem. You make it for yourself firstly, and then if other people want to join in then there we are. – R.S. Thomas (1913–2000)
The poetry of a given age teaches us less what it has, than what it wants and what it loves. It is a living medal, where the concavities in the die are transformed into convexities on the bronze or gold. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
[P]oets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. – Sigmund Freud, quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations by Alan L. Mackay
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. – Edgar Allan Poe
To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession. He requires whatever it needs to be completely his own master. – Robert Graves, Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, 1946
It sometimes seems to me (it is an error, I confess, but one into which I am for ever falling) that poetry is no longer anything more than an imitation of poetry… – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. – Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. – Samuel Johnson
Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. – Jean Cocteau
[P]oetry, that pearl of intelligence and life, reflects on our brow some pale rays of the glory that has faded away from it. – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis
[P]oetry… folds its wings at the rough contact of reality… it feels in one sense much more, and in another much less, than the soul engaged with reality… – Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)
