All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry. Gustave Flaubert
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
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. James Joyce
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. John Updike
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony. Horace Walpole
Poetry is not only dream and vision it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Audre Lorde
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind. Lascelles Abercrombie
But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. Chinua Achebe
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for. Jean Cocteau
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen. Gertrude Stein
France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic. Charles Baudelaire
I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while. Naguib Mahfouz
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. Don Marquis
When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music. Denis Diderot
I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity. Tahar Ben Jelloun
And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will. Ezra Pound
A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel