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Poem Quotes

A poem begins with a lump in the throat
Robert Frost

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Paul Engle

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a world.
Mata Hari quotes

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The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Robert Frost

Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~Kahlil Gibran

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves, 1962 interview on BBC-TV, based on a very similar statement he overheard around 1955


Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost


Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, "Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951


A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valry


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, 1851


Always be a poet, even in prose. ~Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare," Intimate Journals, 1864


Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone




Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered


Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato, Ion


Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats


The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. ~Aristotle, On Poetics


Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg


Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats


A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~Oscar Wilde

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson


The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." ~Robert Penn Warren, "The Themes of Robert Frost," Hopwood Lecture, 1947


A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost


Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley


A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else" The Dame School of Experience, 1920


Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. ~James Branch Cabell


A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard


"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. ~Andr Gide


The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen


It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~Stephen Mallarme


The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed. ~W.B. Yeats


If the author had said "Let us put on appropriate galoshes," there could, of course, have been no poem. ~Author Unknown

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Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis


There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. ~John Cage


Only the poet has any right to be sorry for the poor, if he has anything to spare when he has thought of the dull, commonplace rich. ~William Bolitho


Who can tell the dancer from the dance? ~William Butler Yeats


Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry


If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy


The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau


Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. ~Gustave Flaubert


Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket. ~Charles Simic


The only problem
with Haiku is that you just
get started and then
~Roger McGough


To have great poets there must be great audiences too. ~Walt Whitman


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


Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind. ~Thomas Babington Macaulay


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


You can't write poetry on the computer. ~Quentin Tarantino


Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young. ~Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littraires, 1862


Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker. ~Allen Tate


You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~Joseph Joubert


God is the perfect poet. ~Robert Browning


Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know. ~Joseph Roux, Meditations of a Parish Priest


Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. ~Carl Sandburg


The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood. ~Jean Cocteau, Le Rappel l'ordre, 1926


Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks


Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. ~Thomas Gray


He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise. ~Oscar Wilde


Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost


You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962


Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. ~William Hazlitt


A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. ~Yevgeny Yentushenko, The Sole Survivor, 1982


A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951


Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. ~T.S. Eliot, Dante, 1920


Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows. ~Edmund Burke


Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~Robert Frost


Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything. ~William Blissett


Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. ~Robert Frost


If you've got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow. ~Terri Guillemets


A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. ~Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 1957


We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. Dead Poet's Society


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, Tradition and Individual Talent, 1919


Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content. ~Alfred de Musset, Le Pote dchu, 1839


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, New York Times, 17 February 1957


I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me. ~Edith Sdergran


I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. ~Robert Frost, 1935


Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. ~Robinson Jeffers


He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton


The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics. ~Edgar Allan Poe


The poem... is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. ~Robert Penn Warren, Saturday Review, 22 March 1958


A poem should not mean
But be.
~Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica, 1926


It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. ~W.H. Auden


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


I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. ~Pablo Neruda, quoted in Wall Street Journal,, 14 November 1985


You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto, 1961


Poets aren't very useful
Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful.
~Ogden Nash


What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed? ~W.H. Auden


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


Mathematics and Poetry are... the utterance of the same power of imagination, only that in the one case it is addressed to the head, in the other, to the heart. ~Thomas Hill


The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes. ~W. Somerset Maugham


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


Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. ~Rene Char


Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off. ~Philip Larkin


[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom. ~Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes," Collected Poems of Robert Frost, 1939


Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did. ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe


The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past. ~Robert Frost


[P]oets 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


Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~Edgar Allan Poe


To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost


Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~Carl Sandburg


Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. ~Samuel Johnson


I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. ~Carl Sandburg


The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~Jean Cocteau


Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. ~Don Marquis


No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers. ~Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires


The poetry of the earth is never dead. ~John Keats


A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer.... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. ~E.B. White


The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather. ~Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950


Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ~Rita Dove


Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. ~G.K. Chesterton


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


Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ~Dennis Gabor

About Indo-English Poetry
"Indo-English poetry, whatever may be its rating compared to language writing, seems firmly entrenched in the Indian literary scene today. Despite the sahibs who still harbour hopes of making it big overseas. Some do, true. Dom Moraes has made it, after his fashion. But for most of us the priorities are quite different. And some of us have made it where we always wanted to: right here, where the action and the living audience is."
-- Pritish Nandy in 'Strangertime: an anthology of Indian poetry in English'

Putting Poetry into perspective

Poetry
Poetry is an art form in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. Poetry consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose. Poetry may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. Because of its nature of emphasizing linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another.

Sound in poetry
Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used it extensively.

Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called Alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry.

The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure which determines when the listener expects instances rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme when used in poetic structures help to emphasize and define a rhythmic pattern.

In addition to forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure poetry, sound plays a subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied patterns and emphasizing or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways poets use sound.

Nature of poetry
Poetry can be differentiated most of the time from prose, which is language meant to convey meaning in a more expansive and less condensed way, frequently using more complete logical or narrative structures than poetry does. This does not necessarily imply that poetry is illogical, but rather that poetry is often created from the need to escape the logical. A further complication is that prose poetry combines the characteristics of poetry with the superficial appearance of prose. And there is, of course, narrative poetry, not to mention dramatic poetry, both of which are used to tell stories and so resemble novels and plays. However, both these forms of poetry use the specific features of verse composition to make these stories more memorable or to enhance them in some way.

The Greek verb poieo (I make or create), gave rise to three words: poietis (the one who creates), poiesis (the act of creation), and poiema (the thing created). From these we get three English words: poet (the creator), poesy (the creation) and poem (the created). A poet is therefore one who creates, and poetry is what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as maker or creator is not uncommon. For example, in Anglo-Saxon a poet is a scop (shaper or maker) and in Scots makar.


Poetry and form
Compared with prose, poetry depends less on the linguistic units of sentences and paragraphs, and more on units of organisation that are purely poetic. The typical structural elements are the line, couplet, strophe, stanza, and verse paragraph.

Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the famous To be, or not to be: that is the question. Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer. The linguistic unit is generally completed in the next line: The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This technique is called enjambement, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.

In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.


Poetry and rhetoric
Rhetorical devices such as simile and metaphor are frequently used in poetry. Indeed, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor". However, particularly since the rise of Modernism, some poets have opted for reduced use of these devices, preferring rather to attempt the direct presentation of things and experiences. Other 20th century poets, however, particularly the surrealists, have pushed rhetorical devices to their limits, making frequent use of catachresis.


History of poetry
Poetry as an art form predates literacy. In pre-literate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history, storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law and other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. Poetry is also often closely identified with liturgy in these societies, as the formal nature of poetry makes it easier to remember priestly incantations or prophecies. The greater part of the world's sacred scriptures are made up of poetry rather than prose.

The use of verse to transmit cultural information continues today. Most English speakers know that "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue". An alphabet song teaches the names and order of the letters of the alphabet; another jingle states the lengths and names of the months in the Gregorian calendar. Pre-literate societies, lacking the means to write down important cultural information, use similar methods to preserve it.

Some writers believe that poetry has its origins in song. Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterance - rhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of feeling, the use of refrains - appear to have come about from efforts to fit words to musical forms. However, in the European tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be recited or chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation, developed from 20th century studies of living Montenegran epic reciters by Milman Parry and others, is that rhythm, refrains, and kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.

Walt Whitman stood as a giant of 19th century American poetry.In preliterate societies, all these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. As such, there was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems, given this could change from one performance or performer to another. The introduction of writing tended to fix the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition also meant that poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader. Later, the invention of printing tended to accelerate these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.

The development of literacy gave rise to more personal, shorter poems intended to be sung. These are called lyrics, which derives from the Greek lura or lyre, the instrument that was used to accompany the performance of Greek lyrics from about the seventh century B.C. onward. The Greek's practice of singing hymns in large choruses gave rise, in the sixth century B.C. to dramatic verse, and to the practice of writing poetic plays for performance in their theatres.

In more recent times, the introduction of electronic media and the rise of the poetry reading have led to a resurgence of performance poetry and have resulted in a situation where poetry for the eye and poetry for the ear coexist, sometimes in the same poem. The late 20th century rise of the singer-songwriter and Rap culture and the increase in popularity of Slam poetry have led to a renewed debate as to the nature of poetry that can be crudely characterised as a split between the academic and popular views. As of 2005, this debate is ongoing with no immediate prospect of a resolution.

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