Poetry Quotes

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert Frost

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.

Henrik Ibsen, Norweigen Playwright

The greatest poem is not that which is most skillfully constructed, but that in which there is the most poetry.

L. Schefe

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Kahlil Gibran

Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects.

Stephen Leacock, 1912

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courtly love - Poetry may first have been written during long periods of abstinence on the Crusades, but it would not have flourished in the cold of northern Europe without some help from the chimney.

James Burke

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

John Ruskin

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Havelock Ellis

What is important - what lasts - In another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

Peter Brodie

Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.

Beverly Nichols

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Henry David Thoreau

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

John Keats

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.

Edward Hubbell Chaplin

A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men.

Thomas Carlyle

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

John Masefield

Marty This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.

This Is Spinal Tap

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

M. C. Richards

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

Johnson

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.

Virginia

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

Sooner of later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

R. Z. Sheppard, book critic

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo