As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. T. S. Eliot
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both. Victor Hugo
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter. Victor Hugo
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Emily Dickinson
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. William Wordsworth
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish. William Blake
When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images. Niels Bohr
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly. T. S. Eliot
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. T. S. Eliot
The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture. Richard Dawkins
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry. Emily Dickinson
Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it. Vincent Van Gogh
Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing. Edmund Burke
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. John Keats
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. William Butler Yeats
Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven! Lord Byron