Poetry By Famous Poets Quotes

• Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Beauty, Thoughtful, Poetry

  "The Poetic Principle". Essay by Edgar Allan Poe, 1850.

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• Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

  Plato

  Life, Wise, Wisdom

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  Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

  William Wordsworth

  Powerful, Poetry, Feelings

  Lyrical Ballads 2nd ed., preface (1802) See Dorothy Parker 24

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  Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Motivational, Happiness

  "The Road Not Taken" l. 16 (1916)

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• 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.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Mean, Expression

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

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• Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.

  William Shakespeare

  Summer, Spring, Wind

  Sonnet 18

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• 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

  Beauty, Poetry, World

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1994). “The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley”, p.52, Wordsworth Editions

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• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Time, Men, Profound

  Biographia Literaria ch. 15 (1817)

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• A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

  Paul Valery

  Inspirational, Life, Witty

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• Summer's lease hath all too short a date.

  William Shakespeare

  Summer, Poetry, Too Short

  Sonnet 18

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• Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
  And summer's lease hath all too short a date . . .

  William Shakespeare

  Summer, Art, Wind

  Sonnet 18

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• To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

  Walt Whitman

  Learning, Science, Discovery

  Walt Whitman, Floyd Stovall (2007). “Prose Works 1892, Volume II: Collect and Other Prose”, p.521, NYU Press

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  I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Love, Valentines Day, Cute Boyfriend

  1850 Poems,'Sonnets from the Portuguese', sonnet 43.

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• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Marriage, Sweet Love, Educational

  Sonnets from the Portuguese no. 43 (1850)

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• 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.

  Paul Engle

  Ideas, Reading Poetry, Skins

  New York Times, February 17, 1957.

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• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Passion, Men, Profound

  "Biographia Literaria". Book by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ch. XV, 1817.

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• God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.

  Robert Browning

  God, Perfect, Poet

  'Paracelsus' (1835) pt. 2, l. 648

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

  Robert Frost

  Poetry, Emotion, Found

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• Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

  Alfred de Musset

  Memorable, Two, Poetry

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• A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweller, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more.

  Horace Walpole

  Cutting, Shining, Use

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• 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

  Time, Lying, Party

  Quoted in Barry Miles Ginsberg (1989), ch.5.

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• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Poetry, Personality, Individual Talent

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

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• Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

  Sigmund Freud

  Poet, Has Beens

  "In factor of the sensitive man, and other essays". Book by Anais Nin, p. 14, 1976.

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

  Robert Graves

  Money, Writing, Poetry

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.71, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

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