1.
Before you came
the world was prose.
Now poetry is born.
Nizar Qabbani
'Your entrance sparked the creation of an artistic masterpiece; a metrical composition was born.'
2.
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
Jacques Lacan
3.
Poetry is subconscious conversation, it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.
Sonia Sanchez
4.
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Lucille Clifton
5.
Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person’s life.
Eavan Boland
6.
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science
William Wordsworth
7.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Seamus Heaney
8.
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language
Peter Porter
9.
Poetry is philosophy's sister, the one that wears makeup.
Jennifer Grotz
10.
In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.
Abbas Kiarostami
12.
Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
Diane Wakoski
13.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Matthew Arnold
14.
Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls.
Voltaire
15.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
Wilfred Owen
17.
Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.
Ezra Pound
18.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.
Czeslaw Milosz
21.
Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.
Robert Frost
24.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
27.
Only in Russia poetry is respected - it gets people killed.
Osip Mandelstam
28.
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
Audre Lorde
29.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
Denis Diderot
34.
Poetry is not an assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.
T. S. Eliot
35.
We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.
T. S. Eliot
40.
Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
44.
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
Roberto Bolano
45.
The human creature is alone in his carapace. Poetry is a strong way out.
Stevie Smith
46.
Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.
Herbert McCabe
47.
He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
George Orwell