Poetry Quotes

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."

"If you cannot be a poet, be the poem."

"Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them."

"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own."

"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 poem is never finished, only abandoned."

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

"Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them."

"To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears."

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either."

"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

"Every single soul is a poem."

"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."

"We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

"The moment of change is the only poem."

"You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you."

"Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry."

"The crown of literature is poetry."

"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."

"A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman."

"Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully."

"Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music."

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

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music."

"In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

"In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn."