| Citat |
Sagt av |
| Jag har lagt ut mina drömmar framför dina fötter, gå varsamt, ty du går på mina drömmar. | William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) |
| Jag har skrivit poesi som inte ens jag föstår. | Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) |
| Jag har ätit poesi. | Mark Strand (1934-) |
| Poesi kommer närmare sanningen än historien. | Platon (427 f.Kr.-348 f.Kr.) |
| Poesi är ett eko som bjuder skuggan till dans. | Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) |
| Poesi är människans protest mot att vara den man är. | James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) |
| Poetens mod er at holde den dør på klem, som fører ind til galskaben. | Christopher Morley (1890-1957) |
| Vi er forkomne englebørn med vinger af fremtidssang | Michael Strunge |
| Du skal vokse og blomstre og sætte dine frø. Du er endnu for ringe til at dø! | Morten Nielsen |
| Man skal ikke skrive digte om livet. Man skal skrive digte, der selv er liv. | Morten Nielsen |
| Og den, som kæmper, taber aldrig helt. | Morten Nielsen |
| Edelt er mennesket, jorden er rik!Finnes her nød og sult, skyldes det svik.Knus det! I livet navn skal urett falle.Solskinn og brød og ånd eies av alle. | Nordahl Grieg |
| Poesi er filosofi uden fodnoter. | Per Aage Brandt |
| Et digt er et stykke løsrevet tid. | Per Højholt (1928-) |
| Posi er det, der går tabt i oversættelsen | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| Der er ingen penge i poesi, men der er heller ikke poesi i penge. | Robert Graves (1895-1985) |
| Vin er poesi på flaske. | Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) |
| Uden lidenskab ingen digter, og uden lidenskab ingen poesi | Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) |
| 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 (1859-1936) |
| Good prose is the selection of the best words; poetry is the best words in the best order; and journalese is any old words in any old order | Alan Brewer |
| All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears | Alfred Douglas |
| Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. | Aristoteles (384 f.Kr.-322 f.Kr.) |
| Most wretched men are cradled to poetry by wrong: they learn in suffering what they teach in song | Catullus |
| Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.' | Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) |
| Any healthy man can go without food for two days, but not without poetry | Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) |
| Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. | Charles Simic |
| Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany | Christian Wiman |
| My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me. | Countee Cullen (1903-1946) |
| Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. | Dennis Gabor (1900-1979) |
| Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence | Edmund Clarence Stedman |
| 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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these | Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
| That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous | Galway Kinnell (1927-) |
| The cliche is dead poetry. | Gerald Brenan (1894-1987) |
| Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. | Jacques Maritain (1882-) |
| A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening | James Dickey (1923-) |
| He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech. | John Colville |
| We all write poems; it is simply that the poets are the ones who write in words | John Fowles (1926-) |
| It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms. | John Synge |
| Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking | John Wain |
| I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree | Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) |
| Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture. | Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) |
| Poetry is adjectives expressed in nouns | Leo Stein |
| The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather | Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) |
| No sight is more provocative of awe than is the night sky | Llewelyn Powys |
| You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose. | Mario Cuomo (1932-) |
| Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind. | Maxwell Bodenheim |
| Poetry is not a profession, it is a destiny | Mikhail Dudan |
| 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 (1908-1991) |
| A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart | Peggy Noonan (1950-) |
| You don't go after poetry, you take what comes. Maybe the gods do it through me but I certainly do a hell of a lot of the work. | Phyllis Gotlieb |
| Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. | Rita Dove (1952-) |
| 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 (1905-1989) |
| Poetry is fact given over to imagery | Rod McKuen (1933-) |
| Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal, but which the reader recognizes as his own | Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) |
| Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech | Simonides |
| Poetry is the language of a state of crisis | Stephan Mallarme |
| Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. | Sir Stephen Spender (1909-1995) |
| Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. | Thomas Gray (1716-1771) |
| A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. | Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-1992) |
| Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers | Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-1992) |
| Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold. | Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-) |
| The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. | Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) |
| Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive. | Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) |
| What other people may find in poetry, I find in the flight of a good drive. | Arnold Palmer (1929-) |
| Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades. | Boris L. Pasternak (1890-1960) |
| Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air | Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) |
| Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature. | Sir David Hare (1947-) |
| Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind. | Donald Marquis (1878-1937) |
| These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't. | Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) |
| There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired. | Edward Young (1683-1765) |
| Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle | Edwin Hubbel Chapin (1814-1880) |
| The poet doesn't invent. He listens. | Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) |
| For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle. [It] has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty. | John Cheever (1912-1982) |
| I am two fools, I know, for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry. | John Donne (1572-1631) |
| Dancing is the poetry of the foot. | John Dryden (1631-1700) |
| 'Tis a fine thing for children to learn to make verse; but when they come to be men, they must speak like other men, or else they will be laughed at | John Selden (1584-1654) |
| Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production. | Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) |
| Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions. | Joseph Roux (1834-1905) |
| Poetry is adolescence fermented and thus preserved | José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) |
| If food is poetry, is not poetry also food? | Joyce Carol Oates (1938-) |
| Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen | Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) |
| Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. | Leonard Cohen (1934-) |
| It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back | Marianne Moore (1887-1972) |
| In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty. | Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) |
| 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 (1904-1973) |
| 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 (1792-1822) |
| Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. | Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) |
| In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime. | Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978) |
| Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| Poetry is what gets lost in translation. | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| Poetry: the best words in the best order | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) |
| I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors | Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) |
| From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbor, and to love your neighbor's wife | Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) |
| Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words | Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) |
| Poetry and Hums aren't things which you get, they're things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you. | Winnie the Pooh |
| Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. | Aristoteles (384 f.Kr.-322 f.Kr.) |
| 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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these | Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
| Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. | Thomas Gray (1716-1771) |
| Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking | John Wain |
| Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls. | François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) |
| 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 (1749-1832) |
| Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen | Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) |
| Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them. | Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) |
| 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 (1792-1822) |
| Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. | Platon (427 f.Kr.-348 f.Kr.) |
| A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightening | James Dickey (1923-) |
| In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. | Paul Dirac (1902-1984) |
| A poem begins with a lump in the throat | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. | Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) |
| Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. | Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) |
| I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| If we can discover the meaning in the trilling of a frog, perhaps we may understand why it is for us not merely noise but a song of poetry and emotion. | Adrian Forsyth |
| Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive. | Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) |
| Judge not my passion, by my want of skill,Many love well, though they express it ill. | Anne Finch |
| A poem should not mean, But be | Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) |
| I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance. | Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) |
| Lovers, Travellers, and Poets, will give money to be heard | Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) |
| ...pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source. | Billy Collins (1941-) |
| Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. | Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) |
| Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment | Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) |
| Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. | Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) |
| Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry. | Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-) |
| Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. | Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) |
| Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day | Charles Dickens (1812-1870) |
| Why should poetry have to make sense? | Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) |
| Poetry, men attain By subtler pain More flagrant in the brain - An honesty unfeigned, A heart unchained, A madness well restrained | Christopher Morley (1890-1957) |
| Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do | Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) |
| I am large, I contain multitudes. | Dana Gioia (1950-) |
| Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. | Dennis Gabor (1900-1979) |
| Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction. | Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) |
| With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion. | Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) |
| Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting | Edmund Burke (1729-1797) |
| A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou | Edward Fitzgerald (1809-) |
| There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired. | Edward Young (1683-1765) |
| Poetry is the bill and coo of sex | Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) |
| The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind. | Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
| Narcotics cannot still the toothThat Nibbles at the soul | Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
| If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. | Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
| When I sound the fairy call, gather here in silent meeiing,Chin to knee on the orchard wall, cooled with dew and cherries eating.Merry, merry, take a cherry, mine are sounder, mine are rounder,Mine are sweeter for the eater, when the dews fall, and you'll be fairies all. | Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
| Poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind. | Francis Bacon, Sr. (1561-1626) |
| The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity | George Santayana (1863-1952) |
| Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. | Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) |
| Poetry is as exact a science as geometry | Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) |
| Good poetry .. makes the universe .. reveal its .. 'secret' | Hafiz of Persia |
| 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 (1817-1862) |
| A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child | Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) |
| I am standing upon the seashore.A ship at my side spreads her whitesails to the morning breeze and startsfor the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.Then, someone at my side says;"There, she is gone!""Gone where?"Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.Her diminished size is in me, not in her.And just at the moment when someoneat my side says, "There, she is gone!"There are other eyes watching her coming,and other voices ready to take up the gladshout;"Here she comes!"And that is dying. | Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933) |
| Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice, And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) |
| Every old poem is sacred. | George Horace Lorimer (1867-1937) |
| Poetry is like painting: one piece takes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you keep at some distance | George Horace Lorimer (1867-1937) |
| Some people have the time but they don't have time while others have time but do not have the time. | Jacques Prevert (1900-1977) |
| 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 (1819-1891) |
| Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically. | Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) |
| I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) |
| Poetry lies its way to the truth. | John Ciardi (1916-1986) |
| Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were | John Donne (1572-1631) |
| When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. | John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) |
| Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. | John Keats (1795-1821) |
| The poetry of the earth is never dead. | John Keats (1795-1821) |
| Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity -it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. | John Keats (1795-1821) |
| Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. | John Keats (1795-1821) |
| Poetry is the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions | John Ruskin (1819-1900) |
| I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. | John Updike (1932-) |
| There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. | John Updike (1932-) |
| You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you. | Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) |
| A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings. | Jules Renard (1864-1910) |
| Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. | Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) |
| The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. | Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) |
| Poetry should only occupy the idle. | Lord Byron (1788-1824) |
| You may send poetry to the rich; to poor men give substantial presents | Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121-180) |
| He does not write at all whose poems no man reads | Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121-180) |
| Poetry is all nouns and verbs | Marianne Moore (1887-1972) |
| Poetry, like chastity, can be carried to far | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality | Mark Twain (1835-1910) |
| Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things | Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) |
| By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry | Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) |
| It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. | Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) |
| Poetry, good sir, in my opinion, is like a tender virgin, very young, and extremely beautiful, whom divers others virgins - namely, all the other sciences - make it their business to enrich, polish and adorn; and to her it belongs to make use of them | Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) |
| Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, which cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet and artist has actually expressed | Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) |
| For him in vain the envious seasons roll, Who bears eternal summer in his soul. | Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) |
| There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope | Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) |
| Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments | Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) |
| I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. | Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) |
| In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well | Paul Valéry (1871-1945) |
| To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts | Paul Valéry (1871-1945) |
| Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. | Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) |
| Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. | Platon (427 f.Kr.-348 f.Kr.) |
| He who will have no judge but himself condemns himself | Proverb |
| We [poets] set men free from their desires. | Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) |
| All men have poetry in their hearts, and it is necessary for them, as much as possible, to express their feelings. For this they must have a medium, moving and pliant, which can refreshingly become their own, age after age. All great languages undergo change. Those languages which resist the spirit of change are doomed and will never produce great harvests of thought and literature. When forms become fixed, the spirit either weakly accepts its imprisonment or rebels. All revolutions consists of the "within" fighting against invasion from "without"... All great human movements are related to some great idea. | Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) |
| Language is fossil poetry | Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) |
| Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. | Rita Dove (1952-) |
| Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry.... Friendship... had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me — God of love only knows where. | Robert Burns (1759-1796) |
| Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| A poem begins with a lump in the throat | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| Writing a poem is discovering | Robert Frost (1874-1963) |
| I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. | Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) |
| To feel greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the naturalBeauty, is the sole business of poetry.The rest's diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason. | Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) |
| 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 (1925-) |
| Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair, the midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar; invades the sacred hour of silent rest and leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast. | Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) |
| To a poet nothing can be useless | Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) |
| Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. | Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) |
| Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) |
| Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) |
| Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) |
| It is that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith. | Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) |
| Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech | Simonides |
| Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary. | Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) |
| Poetry is the language of a state of crisis | Stephan Mallarme |
| Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -- that is a life. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. | T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) |
| From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics, compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, in which the two great commandments were, to hate your neighbor, and to love your neighbor's wife | Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) |
| Poetry is music in words; and music is poetry in sound: both excellent sauce, but those have lived and died poor, who made them their meat | Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) |
| Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. | Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) |
| The true poem rests between the words. | Vanna Bonta |
| It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music. | François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) |
| One merit of poetry few persons will deny; it says more, and in few words, than prose | François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) |
| Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings. | W. H. Auden (1907-1973) |
| A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb | W. H. Auden (1907-1973) |
| Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music | Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) |
| Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom. | Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) |
| In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all | Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) |
| The great poems, Shakespeare's included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common man, the life-blood of democracy | Walt Whitman (1819-1892) |
| The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing | Walt Whitman (1819-1892) |
| Was it for this the clay grew tall? | Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) |
| My arms have mutinied against me — brutes!My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease. | Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) |
| Move him into the sun —Gently its touch awoke him once,At home, whispering of fields unsown.Always it woke him, even in France,Until this morning and this snow. | Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) |
| A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,May creep back, silent, to still village wellsUp half-known roads. | Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) |
| Behold,A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.But the old man would not so, but slew his son... | Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) |
| Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truthAll death will he annul, all tears assuage?Or fill these void veins full again with youthAnd wash with an immortal water age? | Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) |
| Of conflicts with others we make retorica, of conflicts with ourselves poetry | William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) |
| We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. | William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) |
| All that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it | William Hazlitt (1778-1830) |
| Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. | William Hazlitt (1778-1830) |
| There lived a sage in days of yore,And he a handsome pigtail wore;But wondered much and sorrowed moreBecause it hung behind him. | William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) |
| Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits andAre melted into air, into thin air:And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolveAnd, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep. | William Shakespeare (1564-1616) |
| The crown of literature is poetry. | William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) |
| Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion | William Wordsworth (1770-1850) |
| Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility | William Wordsworth (1770-1850) |
| Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold. | Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-) |