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Poetry Quotes
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Poetry quotations can give you both a fun and educational view of poetry and
writing poems.  Enjoy this random collection of quotations from poets about poetry.  
We have tried to find as many unique ones for you enjoyment as possible.
 
   
   
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POET TOOLS
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Page One     Page Two    Page Three     Page Four
 
   
       
 
Quotes:  Page One
 
 
 
 
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.  ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry,
"Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.  ~Eli
Khamarov, The Shadow Zone
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.  ~Plato, Ion
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.  ~Oscar Wilde
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter....
~Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr., "kidnap poem"
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so
strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful
music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him:  "Sing for us soon again;"
that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul."  ~Soren Kierkegaard
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a
man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he
has thought of the dull, commonplace rich.  William Bolitho
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The poet doesn't invent.  He listens.  ~Jean Cocteau
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
To have great poets there must be great audiences too.  ~Walt Whitman
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a
banker.  ~Allen Tate
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.  ~Jean Cocteau, Le
Rappel á l'ordre, 1926
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You don't have to suffer to be a poet.  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.  
~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poetry is not always words.  ~Audrey Foris
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.  ~William Blissett
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.  ~Wallace Stevens, Opus
Posthumous, 1957
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.  We read and write poetry because we
are members of the human race.  And the human race is filled with passion.  And medicine,
law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.  But
poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.  Dead Poet's Society
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A poem should not mean
But be.
~Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of
having been moved by words.  The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so
that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.  ~Dylan
Thomas, Poetic Manifesto, 1961
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
It's impossible to write poetry in front of the TV
Almost impossible not to write in the sun
In the woods, every breath is a poem
The words visibly form in the sunbeams,
to those who look for them.
~Daisey Verlaef
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the
princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.  ~Ralph Waldo
Emerson
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens
sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.  ~Christopher Morley,
John Mistletoe
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.  ~Robert Frost, 1935
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
   
     
   
     
   
     
   
     
   
     
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