Poetry has a special place in the hearts of many lit teachers. If this statement rings true for you, you’ve come to the right place! Share the power and joy of verse with your students by presenting our round-up of thought-provoking quotes about poetry. Whether you share these one-liners at the start of every English lesson or simply choose a few to include at the start of your poetry-focused classes, your learners are bound to walk away feeling more captivated by the world of poetic language. Let’s unearth 98 powerful poetry quotes together!
1. “If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
2. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” – William Wordsworth
3. “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – Leonard Cohen
4. “If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.” – David Carradine
5. “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” – Robert Frost
6. “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
7. “Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” – Kahlil Gibran
8. “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” – Robert Frost
9. “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
10. “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.” – Dylan Thomas
11. “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.” – Salman Rushdie
12. “If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.” – Jean Cocteau
13. “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” – Robert Frost
14. “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.” – Edgar Allan Poe
15. “The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aims.” – W. Somerset Maugham
16. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” – John Keats
17. “Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” – Don Marquis
18. “To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.” – Edgar Allan Poe
19. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” – Paul Valéry
20. “A poet can survive everything but a misprint.” – Oscar Wilde
21. “Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.” – Joseph Roux
22. “A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.” – Rene Char
23. “You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick… You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words.” – Dylan Thomas
24. “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” – Robert Frost
25. “If you’ve got a poem within you today, I can guarantee you a tomorrow.” – Edgar Guest
26. “A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can only be a footnote.” – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
27. “Poetry is the deification of reality.” – Edith Sitwell
28. “The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I’ve seen ecstasy or something.” – Rita Dove
29. “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” – Plato
30. “A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer… He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.” – E.B. White
31. “If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.” – Seamus Heaney
32. “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.” – Mark Strand
33. “A poem is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” – Carl Sandburg
34. “Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.” – Marianne Moore
35. “If they give you lined paper, write the other way.” – Juan Ramón Jiménez
36. “Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.” – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare
37. “A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, homesickness, and loneliness. It is never thought, to begin with.” – Robert Frost
38. “For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.” – Carol Ann Duffy
39. “Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.” – James Joyce
40. “Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.” – T. S. Eliot
41. “A poem is a city filled with streets and sewers, filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen, filled with banality and booze, filled with rain and thunder and periods of drought.” – Charles Bukowski
42. “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” – Novalis
43. “Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire
44. “Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.” – Dennis Gabor
45. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” – W. B. Yeats
46. “Poetry is, at the bottom, a criticism of life.” – Matthew Arnold
47. “Poetry: the best words in the best order.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
48. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
49. “Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.” – Voltaire
50. “A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.” – Wallace Stevens
51. “Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” – Khalil Gibran
52. “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.” – Jean Cocteau
53. “Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails 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
54. “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
55. “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” – Carl Sandburg
56. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
57. “Poetry is a kind of witchcraft; we have the power to evoke images and emotions out of the air.” – Erica Jong
58. “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” – Robert Frost
59. “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” – W.B. Yeats
60. “A poet’s work… to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” – Salman Rushdie
61. “You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.” – Joseph Joubert
62. “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.” – Carl Sandburg
63. “The poet is the priest of the invisible.” – Wallace Stevens
64. “Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn.” – Thomas Gray
65. “I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.” – Edgar Allan Poe
66. “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” – Carl Sandburg
67. “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” – Robert Frost
68. “Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.” – W.H. Auden
69. “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.” – W. H. Auden
70. “A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.” – Jean Cocteau
71. “For each ecstatic instant, we must in anguish pay. In keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasy.” – Emily Dickinson
72. “A poem is a spider web spun with words of wonder, woven from the heart.” – Charles Ghigna
73. “Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.” – Carl Sandburg
74. “Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” – John Keats
75. “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
76. “The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.” – Allen Ginsberg
77. “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” – Rita Dove
78. “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” – T. S. Eliot
79. “A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.” – Wallace Stevens
80. “Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.” – Pablo Neruda
81. “Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.” – Alice Walker
82. “To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.” – George Eliot
83. “Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul.” – Henrik Ibsen
84. “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.” – Jean Cocteau
85. “Poetry is just so emo.’ he said. ‘Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.” – John Green
86. “The poet… may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.” – Lionel Trilling
87. “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
88. “The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
89. “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” – Sigmund Freud
90. “It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” – T.S. Eliot
91. “You’re the strangest person I ever met, she said & I said you too & we decided we’d know each other a long time.” – Brian Andreas
92. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” – William Wordsworth
93. “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” – Muriel Rukeyser
94. “The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” – Jean Cocteau
95. “Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.” – Ishmael Reed
96. “If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul; you haven’t experienced poetry.” – Edgar Allan Poe
97. “A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
98. “Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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