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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.

  William Shakespeare

  Summer, Spring, Wind

  Sonnet 18

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

  Salvatore Quasimodo

  Inspirational, Believe, Poetry

  Speech in New York, 13 May 1960, in New York Times 14 May 1960, p. 47

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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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• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Love, Boyfriend, Valentine

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

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

  George Sand

  Poetry, Noble, Delight

  George Sand (1800). “The Haunted Pool: (La Mare Au Diable).”, p.20

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• Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.

  Sigmund Freud

  Knowledge, Men, Poetry

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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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• 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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• Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth.

  Robert Frost

  Sorry, Taken, Journey

  Robert Frost, Gary D. Schmidt (1994). “Robert Frost”, p.21, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

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• Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Theatre, Triumph, Losing

  "If - " st. 1 (1910)

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• Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

  John Keats

  Writing, Poetry, Soul

  Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 224

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• All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mearly players.

  William Shakespeare

  Friendship, Birthday, Men

  'As You Like It' (1599) act 2, sc. 7, l. 139

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• What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

  W. H. Auden

  Poet, Said, Reader

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• One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

  W. H. Auden

  Unique, Reality, Two

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• If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

  Emily Dickinson

  Taken, Writing, Poetry

  Quoted in Martha Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924)

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• The true philosopher and the true poet are one,
  and a beauty, which is truth,
  and a truth, which is beauty,
  is the aim of both.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Philosopher, Poet, Aim

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2006). “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems”, p.44, Bantam Classics

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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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