Poetry Quotes

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

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.

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

We feel that this state and indeed this nation and this world is desperately in need of the deepest and most profound human values that poetry can teach. That is what Keats and Du Bois called for the poet to do, to bring Truth and Beauty. To be like the most ancient paradigmythic image of […]

In his poetry as well as in his life Shelley was indeed ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel’, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.

I’ve read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of nature of universals, whereas those of history are of singulars.

You can live three days without bread – without poetry, never – you need art. Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal. You understand its function , you gentlemen of the bourgeoisie – whether lawgivers or […]

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

When Elizabeth Bishop agreed to teach a poetry workshop for the first time (1966), she was dismayed. Her students didn’t know anything but the urge to “discover” or “express” themselves. So she sat them difficult metrical exercises, insisting: “You should have your head filled with poems all the time, until they almost get in your […]