"I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down."
Read quote
6 likes
Poetry quotes
Poetry
987 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Poetry
Browse quotes that often appear alongside poetry — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Poetry quotes (page 11 of 50)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing."
Read quote
6 likes
"The meaning of poetry has no sureness of direction; is like the sling, it is not under control."
Read quote
6 likes
"All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face."
Read quote
6 likes
"What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them."
Read quote
6 likes
"Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you"
Read quote
6 likes
"Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank."
Read quote
6 likes
"Personality must be accepted for what it is. You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets."
Read quote
6 likes
"Poetry comes fine-spun from a mind at peace."
Read quote
6 likes
"The freedom of poetic license."
Read quote
6 likes
"There were poets before Homer."
Read quote
6 likes
"The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling."
Read quote
6 likes
"My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it."
Read quote
6 likes
"Poetry implies the whole truth. Philosophy expresses a particle of it."
Read quote
6 likes
"Good poetry seems so 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."
Read quote
6 likes
"Poetry is nothing but healthy speech."
Read quote
6 likes
"The works of great poets have never been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them."
Read quote
6 likes
"I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet."
Read quote
6 likes
"Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men."
Read quote
6 likes
"There are poets and there are grownups."
Read quote
6 likes