Poetry

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

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

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

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

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

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

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

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Walt Whitman

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

Poetry is not always words.
Audrey Foris

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Robert Frost

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato

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

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire

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

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T.S. Eliot

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

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Shelley

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

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

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