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
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Robert Frost
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. Joseph Joubert
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry. Charles Baudelaire
Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. Georges Braque
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T S Eliot
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. Thomas Hardy
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men’s souls. James Russell Lowell
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Don Marquis
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. Thomas Babington Macaulay
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. John Keats
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge. Brooks Atkinson
I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. Russell Baker
Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life. Matthew Arnold
Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have. John Masefield
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. Emily Dickinson
Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time. Christopher Fry
Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. Christopher Fry
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. Allen Ginsberg
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
In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable. Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat. A E Housman
It is a very rare thing anywhere, especially in England, for a man deliberately to choose poetry as the duty of his life, and to remain loyal, as a consequence, to the bride of St Francis – Poverty. Andrew Lang
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world. Archibald MacLeish
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. Jacques Maritain
For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose. Sylvia Plath
The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform. Adrienne Rich
Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. Joseph Roux
Poetry…is…a speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight. Sir Philip Sidney
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen. Gertrude Stein
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. William Butler Yeats
It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither. Gerard Manley Hopkins
Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion. William Wordsworth
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary. Sir Walter Scott