Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

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

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.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

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

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.

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

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

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

The essentials of poetry are rhythm, dance, and the human voice.

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

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

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul.".