880 Quotes Regarding Poetry

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Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
Samuel Johnson

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
John Ruskin

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
Horace

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire

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

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.
Andre Gide

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Joubert

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Jean Cocteau

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
George Sand