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


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


A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Paul Valery


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


A poet can survive everything but a misprint. Oscar Wilde


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. Oscar Wilde


Always be a poet, even in prose. Charles Baudelaire


Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. Charles Baudelaire


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


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


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


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


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


God is the perfect poet. Robert Browning


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


I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. Carl Sandburg


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


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


One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. Voltaire


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


Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. Novalis


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


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


Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Carl Sandburg


Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. Robert Frost


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


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


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


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


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


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. Plato


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 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


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


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


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


Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. Carl Sandburg


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


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


Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. Carl Sandburg


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


Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Robert Frost


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


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


Poetry: the best words in the best order. Samuel Taylor Coleridge


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


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


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


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



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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one. John Ruskin


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


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


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