Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I found that it wasn’t so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they’re kindred spirits.

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry

A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors

By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high, we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

I think that to transfuse emotion – not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer – is the peculiar function of poetry.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. It is now destined to see a better scholar than Wordsworth and a better poet than Porson betwixt and between.

There, by the starlit fences,
The wanderer halts and hears
My soul that lingers sighing
About the glimmering weirs.

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

It was illumination, a great light in the darkness of his ignorance, and he read poetry more avidly than ever.

Is not poetry the food of love?

Mephostopheles is the name of a male gigolo I knew. When he’s reaching up to grab me, I suppose it’s an erotic bit of poetry

Then one can’t make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply

My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand

Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic

Poetry can cause irreparable harm when misapplied.

How can you do both? In physics we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something that nobody knew before. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” Flattered, Robert just laughed.

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it’s so pure and powerful.

I am a student of life, and don’t want to miss any experience. There’s poetry in this sort of thing, you know–or perhaps you don’t know, but it’s all the same.

Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God

Poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.

But it isn’t easy,’ said Pooh. ‘Because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.

Emerson lectured and wrote treaties and essays, and masses of clotted, cabbagey poetry. Reading him is like trying to hack your way through a swamp of creeping verbiage

I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.

I’ve been writing songs since I was like six or seven. I’ve been writing poetry and short stories and stuff, but my first serious, serious song, I wrote when I was fourteen.

Poetry simply exists within me, and on my lap; it is the thirst of a submerged childhood. Although the result is bitter and hard, the poetry I make cleanses me of the world’s dust and even the inscrutable, essential vileness similar to what we call original sin.

Give me your hand and we’ll dance; give me your hands and love me. Like one flower we’ll be, and nothing else.

The gods give, like twin flowers,
power and ruin, memory and oblivion.

Everyone left and we have remained
on a path that goes on without us.

Because she—you hear her—she’s calling,
and is always going to call, and it’s better
both of us die by the dagger without anyone
seeing us, Orestes, and die a fit death.

I am Cassandra—she who, without asking,
understood it all and still came to her fate,
I, Cassandra, full of visions,
who sees her own death without turning away,
and hears in the night the day that follows.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

My literary background was basically in poetry, but bad poetry, since only through bad poetry can you get to good poetry.

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

Wine is bottled poetry.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that’s what a poet is doing: loosening the words.

Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

You’ve often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don’t know why people shouldn’t write poetry. That’s brave.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Poetry is not truth, rather it’s the finest kind of truth.

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

If certain critics and poetasters had their way, ‘Ordinary Piety’ and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.

I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed – it is, indeed, unavoidable.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth’s dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.

I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry at my fingertips.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

One can never be sure whether it’s good poetry or bad acid

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

There was a touch of mysticism and poetry in her nature which made her love to gaze at the purple sunsets and watch the evening stars

I know my ABC’s yet you keep teaching me. I say, f*ck your degree, alphabet boy! You think you’re smarter than me with all your bad poetry? F*ck all your ABC’s, alphabet boy!

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

When in April the sweet showers fall And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all The veins are bathed in liquor of such power As brings about the engendering of the flower.

He isn’t going to quote poetry, he’s not thinking about you every moment, but he will give you a part of him that he knows you could break.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation.

Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.

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

The world needs poetry now more than ever. It’s the only thing that can keep music from copying itself and sounding the same.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

If you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

And as to me, I know nothing else but miracles.