Poetry Quotes

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
Robert Frost

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
Douglas Dunn

A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense.
Thomas Harrison

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
Anne Stevenson

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. Auden

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
Oscar Wilde

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.
Muriel Rukeyser

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau

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

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
Anne Stevenson

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A. E. Housman