Poetry Quotes

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country.

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.

If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

He who has religion will speak poetry. But philosophy is the tool with which to seek and discover religion.

Probably all the attention to poetry results in some value, though the attention is more often directed to lesser than to greater values.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.

That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.