Quotes About Poetry

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge...

Poetry is just the evidence of a life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

poetry is flitting butterfly words leaving inky spots on fragile papery wings

All poetry is simply an escape from reality. It says what is palpably not true. The only difference between poets is a difference in the kind of escape they crave. Some are content with visions of a pretty girl who is also a good cook and pays for the marketing out of her own funds; others demand the insane consolations of metaphysics, or the hiding-place of a jargon no one can understand.

And poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

I would define... the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.

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

Disrespect for poets is a kind of tradition.

poets swing too high until the chain kinks and snaps mid-air the fall is poetry

A rose in sunlight is nature. A rose in the dark is poetry.

I sew my life together with the glittering threads of poetry.

What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?

Thomas Holley Chivers is at the same time one of the best and one of the worst poets in America. His productions affect one as a wild dream — strange, incongruous, full of images of more than arabesque monstrosity, and snatches of sweet unsustained song. Even his worst nonsense (and some of it is horrible) has an indefinite charm of sentiment and melody.

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 and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Words are rather the drossy part of poetry; imagination the life of it.

If it is a wild tune, it is a poem... Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled. It should be of the pleasure of the poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.

Good poetry, like music or a sweet touch, can doctor us up, be an antidote for an hour or longer, help us to get dressed for another day — combat the blues enough to mount the horse again; and maybe even aid one in laying down the insidious weight of some old grudge or deep-rooted anxiety. Herein enters Rumi.... draws us near to his — and our own — inner light.... From head to toe this guy is blazing. He is like a cyclone one wants to be drawn into...

Of course, talking only in proverbs would be impossible. Proverbs are full of poetry and twists. They are made up of words that have been molded for centuries, if not milleniums, until a minimum of words carry an extraordinary potential for meaning.

Its benefits to the poet are evident: the rhyme is merely a glorified pun, two strings of ideas bisociated in an acoustic knot.

The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem.

As the highly colored birds do not fly around in the dull, leaden plains of a sandy desert, but amid all the settings of nature's leaves and blossoms, and lights and shades—nature's framework of their picture—so there are truths which do not appear well in arid fields of philosophic inquiry, but which demand the colored air and the bowers of poetry to be the setting of their charms.

Rain utters poetry in drops, splats, and puddles.

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