Quotes About Poetry

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint. He does not let himself go on cheese. Except Virgil and the anonymous rhymer of "If all the trees were bread and cheese," I can recall no verse about cheese. Yet it has every quality which we require in exalted poetry. It is a short, strong word, and it rhymes to "breeze" and "seas." Cheese has also variety, the very soul of song.

By all means give us as much truth as possible, even though the dose is ever so bitter... Truth, man! truth is the only true poetry, if the business of poetry is to move the feelings... [B]read and meat... are facts... Bread and truth are all man wants; and a loaf is only an eatable lump of truth fitted for the body, as truth is the invisible, but no less substantial, bread of the spirit.

I eat bad poetry like a goat — and eat good poetry like a gourmand.

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

Poetry is emotion put into measure.

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.

A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. Some poems took years to find their words.

I am searching for my feelings through shelves of dusty books can't help but feel I've left them in some forgotten ancient nooks as if an author long before me captured my emotions in his day and saved them in fine poetry for future me to find someway

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness: But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

He who draws noble delights from the sentiment of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

...lyrical poems, deriving from everywhere and nowhere as is the case with all poetry...

...since a lunch was cancelled because of the snow, I was suddenly given a few hours of unexpected time and managed to get down a poem that had been pursuing me for days.

Poets smoke nature and beauty and angst and exhale swirling plumes of poetry.

If you got to talking to most cowboys, they'd admit they write 'em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. What he does is to subject them to treatment which ensures their having the finest colour and the sweetest scent.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

A poet can translate birdsong much more faithfully than the biologist ever could.

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

Is there such a thing as pure unmingled poetry, poetry independent of meaning? 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.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Poetry is an inky soulprint.

The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the ship-builder.

Poetry treks through our souls and tells us in rhyme of the adventure.