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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
- T. S. Eliot

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

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
- Rita Dove

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
- Samuel McChord Crothers

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
- Leonard Cohen

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
- Jean Cocteau

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
- Jean Cocteau

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
- Jean Cocteau

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
- Jean Cocteau

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
- John Ciardi

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
- Rene Char

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
- John Cage

God is the perfect poet.
- Robert Browning

Always be a poet, even in prose.
- Charles Baudelaire

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
- W. H. Auden

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
- Joseph Joubert

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
- Samuel Johnson

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
- A. E. Housman

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
- Horace

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
- William Hazlitt

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
- Thomas Hardy

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
- Thomas Gray

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
- Robert Graves

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.
- Andre Gide

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
- Kahlil Gibran

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
- Dennis Gabor

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
- Robert Frost

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
- Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
- Robert Frost

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
- Robert Frost

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
- Robert Frost

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
- E. M. Forster

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
- Gustave Flaubert

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

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
- Oscar Wilde

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
- Oscar Wilde

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
- Walt Whitman

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
- Robert Penn Warren

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
- Lionel Trilling

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
- Wallace Stevens

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
- Charles Simic

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
- Charles Simic

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
- Carl Sandburg
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
- Carl Sandburg

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

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
- Salman Rushdie

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
- Richard Rosen

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

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
- Edgar Allan Poe

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
- Plutarch

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
- Plato

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
- Novalis

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
- Alfred de Musset

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
- Marianne Moore

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
- Don Marquis

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
- Eli Khamarov

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
- John Keats