Poetry Quotes

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. Plato (BC 427-BC 347)

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the sky. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

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 we have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things.  T. S. Eliot  (1888-1965)

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.  W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

Any healthy man [woman] can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Robert Frost (1875-1963)

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792- 1822)

Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry. William Butler Yeats (1865- 1939)

My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me. Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. Plato (BC 427- BC 347)