Quotes About Poetry

Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.

When the lyrical muse sings the creative pen dances.

Many Americans first fell in love with the poetry of the thirteenth century teacher and spiritual leader Jelalludin Rumi during the early 1990s when the unparalleled lyrical grace, philosophical brilliance, and spiritual daring of his work took modern Western readers completely by surprise. The impact of its soulful beauty and the depth of its profound humanity were so intense that they reportedly prompted numerous individuals to spontaneously compose poetry.

The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi's poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal.

Poetry is less a respecter of individual persons than it is a compassionate witness to the meanings of the secret language that beats inside human hearts, the music that pulses through human cries, and the divinity which shines love beyond the veils of human limitations.

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future

It may be that poetry's real beauty and elegance is not its finely-chiseled lines or smoothly-rounded ideological concepts at all. The crown of its significance might be––or possibly should be?––its expansive capacity to embrace with equal passion the deadliest failings and the most splendid victories defining human existence.

I had never thought of haiku, or any kind of poetry for that matter, as a social activity.

looking at the poems of John Gray when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin, I suggested to Oscar Wilde that he should go a step further than these minor poets; he should publish a book all margin; full of beautiful, unwritten thoughts.

Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.

It turns out poetry does, in fact, do the thing I want it to do… it helps me return to the world, to experience it, to pay attention.

The other day someone I know posted a quote from the poet Mary Oliver, "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" And I almost began to cry. I kept thinking of how scared I've been, how scared many of us have been during these years of the pandemic. And of course, it's not just the pandemic, so many overwhelming fears. I read that quote and I suddenly longed for breath. For relief. For the end of fear.

If I'd a handmade, fanned out, feathered set, me? I'd choose the moon, always the sister moon.

Does poetry have its issues? One hundred percent. Does poetry have its limitations? One hundred percent. It's not going to cure disease or feed the hungry, but it might help us to understand someone else's experience just a little bit better. Or maybe it'll make us mad and then we'll have to interrogate why we're mad, or implicated, or why we feel left out. Like many of the arts, poetry can be the way of recognizing our own beauty and our own flaws.

for us there still exists a serene, unfathomable abyss in which God and the spirits dwell. The soul, in moments of ecstasy, often soars across it; poetry unveils it at times with childlike naivete; but science with its hammer and yardstick is often perched at the rim and may, in many cases, contribute nothing at all.

Depc? was, wszyscy poeci, wszyscy m?drce i proroki, Których wielbi? ?wiat szeroki.

genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood

Poetry is the intuitive explanation of the unconscious mind

Evolutionary biology is now uttering and seeking those forces that link us with all those that have being. If we can discover the meaning in the trilling of a frog, perhaps we may understand why it is for us not merely noise but a song of poetry and emotion.

I think poetry is a shared thing, a gift for both the writer and the reader. If we caretake that gift to the best of our abilities, we create an experience that is simultaneously personal and collective."- Adrian Matejka

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative.

Stadium rock and commercial rock are the opposite of what poetry needs. An audience of around 200 is ideal for poetry.