Poetry Quotes

One merit of poetry few persons will deny; it says more, and in few words, than prose.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.

There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

It is the dissatisfaction with empiric evidence that makes the poet and the mystic, for it is the lyric as well as the Bachantic impulse… Its purest form is probably manifested by children and birds in their rhapsodic moments of flight and play, especially during the last few minutes of pale blue summer dusk before […]

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Yes, threadbare seem his songs, to lettered ken – they were worn threadbare next the hearts of men. (On Longfellow)