Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
5 thoughts from Robert Staughton Lynd
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
14 wisdom & wit from F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
23 quotes from T. S. Eliot
I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
4 more thoughts from John Cage
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
60 sayings from H. L. Mencken
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
63 more sayings from Samuel Johnson
Poetry is the deification of reality.
2 other sayings from Edith Sitwell
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
23 sayings from T. S. Eliot
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
4 other sayings from John Cage
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
16 quotes from Paul Valery
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
100 more thoughts from Oscar Wilde
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
16 quotes from Wallace Stevens
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
100 quotes from Oscar Wilde
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
8 other thoughts from Ezra Pound
Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
16 other thoughts from Wallace Stevens
However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
6 sayings from Eugenio Montale
I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
6 more thoughts from Eugenio Montale
In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.
16 views from Paul Valery
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
16 other views from Wallace Stevens
Money is a kind of poetry.
16 quotes from Wallace Stevens
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
8 more quotes from Ezra Pound
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
6 wisdom & wit from Eugenio Montale
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
2 quotes from Robert Fitzgerald
Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.
6 views from Eugenio Montale
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
16 more sayings from Denis Diderot
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
19 more views from John Keats
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
24 views from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
6 wisdom & wit from Eugenio Montale
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
7 wisdom & wit from Jean Giraudoux
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
19 sayings from John Keats
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
6 other quotes from Eugenio Montale
'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
22 wisdom & wit from Andre Gide
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
6 more sayings from Norman MacCaig
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
6 other quotes from Norman MacCaig
Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
14 views from Muhammad Iqbal
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
5 sayings from William C. Bryant
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
12 more quotes from James Broughton
How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
3 other quotes from Allen Tate
However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.
2 views from James Schuyler
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
2 more quotes from Isaac Rosenberg
I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
6 wisdom & wit from Norman MacCaig
I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.
5 other quotes from Marianne Moore
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
6 other wisdom & wit from Norman MacCaig
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
14 other thoughts from Muhammad Iqbal
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
12 quotes from James Broughton
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
12 more sayings from James Broughton
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
2 views from Isaac Rosenberg
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
78 more quotes from Voltaire
Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases.
8 more quotes from William Shenstone
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
12 other sayings from James Broughton
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
5 thoughts from Marianne Moore
Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique.
2 sayings from Karl Shapiro
Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
5 thoughts from Marianne Moore
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
4 quotes from Jacques Maritain
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
12 views from James Broughton
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
12 quotes from James Broughton
Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.
2 more quotes from James Schuyler
When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous.
6 other thoughts from Norman MacCaig
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
14 views from Muhammad Iqbal
Wine is bottled poetry.
39 sayings from Robert Louis Stevenson
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
30 more quotes from Gustave Flaubert
Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
3 quotes from Muriel Rukeyser
Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
3 sayings from Alfred de Musset
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
30 more sayings from Gustave Flaubert
I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.
3 quotes from Charles Olson
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
11 quotes from Manuel Puig
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
26 quotes from Emily Dickinson
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
26 other sayings from Emily Dickinson
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
14 more quotes from Jim Morrison
If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.
3 views from Muriel Rukeyser
Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.
14 sayings from Jim Morrison
Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
8 other sayings from Matthew Arnold
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
30 quotes from Gustave Flaubert
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
8 more quotes from Matthew Arnold
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
5 quotes from Edwin Hubbel Chapin
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
2 quotes from Thomas Gray
The novel is born of disillusionment the poem, of despair.
5 sayings from Jose Bergamin
The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
3 thoughts from Muriel Rukeyser
The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.
3 quotes from Louis Kronenberger
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
26 other quotes from Emily Dickinson
You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.
3 other sayings from Charles Olson
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
7 other quotes from Jose Marti
A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
36 quotes from Lord Byron
A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.
2 quotes from Thomas Harrison
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
26 wisdom & wit from E. M. Forster
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
19 sayings from Edgar Allan Poe
I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.
10 more quotes from John Donne
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
19 more wisdom & wit from Edgar Allan Poe
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
24 quotes from Carl Sandburg
If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.
3 views from Lascelles Abercrombie
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
4 more quotes from Federico Fellini
No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.
2 more wisdom & wit from Thomas Harrison
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
17 views from Plutarch
Poetry brings all possible experience to the same degree: a degree in the consciousness beyond which the consciousness itself cannot go.
2 quotes from Laura Riding
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
56 views from Khalil Gibran
Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.
4 more quotes from George Farquhar
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
24 thoughts from Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
24 more quotes from Carl Sandburg
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
3 sayings from Michael Tippett
Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.
2 quotes from John Denham
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
37 more quotes from Edmund Burke
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
24 thoughts from Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
19 quotes from Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
24 quotes from Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
3 sayings from Lascelles Abercrombie
Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
6 more views from Franz Grillparzer
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
9 other sayings from Walter Savage Landor
Prose talks and poetry sings.
6 quotes from Franz Grillparzer
Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.
30 other thoughts from Virginia Woolf
The crown of literature is poetry.
29 wisdom & wit from W. Somerset Maugham
The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does.
3 quotes from Lascelles Abercrombie
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
26 sayings from E. M. Forster
To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.
2 views from Laura Riding
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
24 quotes from Carl Sandburg
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
24 other wisdom & wit from Carl Sandburg
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
19 other quotes from Edgar Allan Poe
Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
36 thoughts from Lord Byron
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
30 thoughts from Virginia Woolf
A lot happens by accident in poetry.
9 more quotes from Howard Nemerov
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
21 more sayings from W. H. Auden
A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
21 sayings from W. H. Auden
Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
4 sayings from George Murray
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
9 other thoughts from Howard Nemerov
I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
3 quotes from James Dickey
I wish you would read a little poetry sometimes. Your ignorance cramps my conversation.
2 other quotes from Anthony Hope
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
9 more thoughts from Howard Nemerov
It is written on the arched sky it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
45 sayings from John Ruskin
Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.
2 other thoughts from Andres Segovia
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
31 quotes from Gertrude Stein
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
11 sayings from James Joyce
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
73 views from Victor Hugo
Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.
5 sayings from Theodore Sturgeon
She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
3 other views from James Dickey
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
45 quotes from John Ruskin
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
4 views from Frederick William Robertson
The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
4 wisdom & wit from George Murray
Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
4 other quotes from George Murray
Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
16 sayings from Havelock Ellis
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
45 sayings from John Ruskin
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
50 quotes from Robert Frost
But it is the province of religion, of philosophy, of pure poetry only, to go beyond life, beyond time, into eternity.
2 other views from Alfred de Vigny
In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.
6 quotes from Phyllis McGinley
My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
2 quotes from Wilfred Owen
Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.
2 sayings from Wilfred Owen
Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
50 views from Robert Frost
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
50 thoughts from Robert Frost
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
50 more views from Robert Frost
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
50 wisdom & wit from Robert Frost
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
23 other quotes from Vincent Van Gogh
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
105 quotes from Albert Einstein
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes to hear it is to see it with our ears.
5 other quotes from Octavio Paz
You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.
3 other views from Stephane Mallarme
Always be a poet, even in prose.
25 more wisdom & wit from Charles Baudelaire
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
25 more quotes from Charles Baudelaire
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
2 thoughts from Robert Penn Warren
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
3 quotes from John Millington Synge
Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
9 thoughts from Vladimir Nabokov
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
38 other sayings from William Hazlitt
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
2 other wisdom & wit from James Branch Cabell
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
21 sayings from William Wordsworth
Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.
2 views from James Martineau
The cliche is dead poetry.
3 thoughts from Gerald Brenan
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
13 more quotes from John Muir
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
2 wisdom & wit from Robert Penn Warren
Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
20 views from Herbert Spencer
Why should poetry have to make sense?
11 more wisdom & wit from Charlie Chaplin
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
52 more sayings from Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
5 wisdom & wit from Dennis Potter
God is the perfect poet.
22 other quotes from Robert Browning
I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
2 other quotes from Keith Haring
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
2 quotes from Randall Jarrell
Love is the poetry of the senses.
53 sayings from Honore de Balzac
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
10 sayings from Novalis
Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
4 other wisdom & wit from Jose Ortega y Gasset
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.
8 sayings from Joseph Brodsky
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.
2 thoughts from Georges Braque
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
52 quotes from Gilbert K. Chesterton
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
30 sayings from Walt Whitman
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
14 other sayings from Joseph Joubert
You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.
14 sayings from Joseph Joubert
But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.
5 other quotes from John Drinkwater
For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.
5 more quotes from John Drinkwater
I read poetry to save time.
53 more views from Marilyn Monroe
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
3 other thoughts from Allen Ginsberg
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
14 more thoughts from Thomas Hardy
If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.
5 sayings from John Drinkwater
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
5 more quotes from John Drinkwater
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.
2 views from John Masefield
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
14 sayings from Thomas Hardy
Poetry is life distilled.
2 quotes from Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
5 thoughts from Gaston Bachelard
Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.
5 other quotes from John Drinkwater
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
6 other quotes from John Ciardi
The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
5 other thoughts from Gaston Bachelard
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
3 views from Allen Ginsberg
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
28 more quotes from William Butler Yeats
You don't have to suffer to be a poet adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
6 thoughts from John Ciardi
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
24 quotes from Jean Cocteau
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
8 views from Raymond Chandler
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
24 thoughts from Jean Cocteau
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
9 more wisdom & wit from George Sand
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
117 sayings from Henry David Thoreau
If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.
4 wisdom & wit from Robert Graves
Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.
2 quotes from Anatole Broyard
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
24 wisdom & wit from Jean Cocteau
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
18 other sayings from Don Marquis
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
18 views from Don Marquis
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
24 more sayings from Jean Cocteau
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
24 more views from Jean Cocteau
The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
6 more sayings from Lionel Trilling
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
3 wisdom & wit from Margaret Walker
There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired.
14 quotes from Edward Young
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
4 quotes from Robert Graves
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
18 more views from Don Marquis
Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
17 more quotes from John Dryden
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
2 other wisdom & wit from Paul Dirac
I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.
5 quotes from Will Cuppy
I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
2 views from Knut Hamsun
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
19 quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
19 quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
2 quotes from Salvatore Quasimodo
Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
2 quotes from Johann Georg Hamann
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
19 views from Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
2 views from Salvatore Quasimodo
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
19 other quotes from Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
7 more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
19 sayings from Percy Bysshe Shelley
Teach you children poetry it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
15 quotes from Walter Scott
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.
26 quotes from Jean de la Bruyere
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
5 more quotes from Maria Montessori