50 Powerful Quotes About Poetry

As many of you know, I am a huge fan of poetry as I know many of you are as well.

Down below is a list of 50 very powerful quotes about poetry and I'm almost positive the community will enjoy.

Let me know what you guys think ;)

1. Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. ― Joseph Roux

2. Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it. ― Rumi

3. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ― Leonard Cohen

4. Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ― Dylan Thomas

5. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ― Emily Dickinson

6. I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. ― Kenneth Rexroth

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

8. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. ― Carl Sandburg

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

10. Poetry is an act of peace. – Pablo Neruda

11. 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

12. Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

13. Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition – Eli Khamarov

14. There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired. — Edward Young

15. If you can’t be a poet, be the poem. – David Carradine

16. 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

17. The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens

18. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. – Percy Byshe Shelley

19. Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. – Christopher Fry

20. The poet doesn’t invent. He listens. – Jean Cocteau

21. There is poetry as soon as we realize we possess nothing. – John Cage

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

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

24. Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. – James Tate

25. Poetry is frosted fire. – J. Patrick Lewis

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

27. 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

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

29. Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. – Leonardo da Vinci

30. Poetry lies its way to the truth. – John Ciardi

31. For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. – Robert Penn Warren

32. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. – William Butler Yeats

33. Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. – Yevgeny Yevtushenko

34. I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn’t come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem. – Lucille Clifton

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

36. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. – Carl Sandburg

37. Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. — Nikki Giovanni

38. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents. – William Carlos Williams

39. All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’ – Sonia Sanchez

40. My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. – John Lennon

41. If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

42. Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ― Virginia Woolf

43. Writing poetry is a state of free float. ― Margaret Atwood

44. There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. ― Gustave Flaubert

45. Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. ― Jack Kerouac

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

47. Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis

48. Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its divine origin. — Beecher

49. The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. ― Christopher Morley

50. The true poem rests between the words. ― Vanna Bonta

Do you have a favorite? Leave it in the comments!