Good poetry is like effective prayer, it feeds the human spirit, it nourishes, it puts us in touch with forces far greater than ourselves — Lorna Goodison
Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. — James Tate
Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. — Robert Fitzgerald
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. — Stephen Spender
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. — Thomas Gray
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. — Paul Engle
Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success. — Babette Deutsch
If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry. — Edgar Allan Poe
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment — Galway Kinnell
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Short Good Poetry Quotes
The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet. — Mahatma Gandhi
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. — Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. — W. H. Auden
Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men. — Thomas Carlyle
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. — Leonard Cohen
The true poem is the poet's mind. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it — Gustave Flaubert
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. — Novalis
Good Poetry Image Quotes
The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.
Good Morning Quotes
Every day may not be good... but there's something good in every day — Alice Morse Earle
Just one small positive thought in the morning can change your whole day. — Dalai Lama
Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that! It lights up the whole sky. — Unknown Author
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. — Rumi
Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate! — Julian Bond
love the life you live. live the life you love. — Bob Marley
Persist to overcome. He that can't endure the bad, will not live to see the good.
The prayer offered to God in the morning during your quiet time is the key that unlocks the door of the day. Any athlete knows that it is the start that ensures a good finish. — Adrian Rogers
Be willing to be a beginner every single morning. — Meister Eckhart
Wake up every morning with a thankful attitude. Expect something good to happen in your life today. — Joel Osteen
Simple Poetry Quotes
The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible. — Paul Dirac
The music that really moves me is music that's written by people where there isn't a lot of money and they're really singing with just their voice and a guitar about their feelings and about their life. Their poetry is relatively simple, in the sense that it's about their soul in jeopardy. — Anton Yelchin
I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies. — Boris Pasternak
Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.
Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
Heroes in history seem to us poetic because they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry. — George William Curtis
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. — Henry David Thoreau
Never regret a day in your life: good days give happiness, bad days give experience, worst days give lessons, and best days give memories.
I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry. — Billy Collins
My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away. — Jean Cocteau
All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. — John Kenneth Galbraith
A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves. — Jane Hirshfield
Great Poetry Quotes
You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does. — Robert Morgan
Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist. — Steven Seagal
Whatever is good for you soul, do that.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep... — Robert Frost
Try no to resist the changes that come in your way. Instead, let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come? How Rumi Can Change Your Life?
Time is the coin of life. Only you can determine how it will be spent. — Carl Sandburg
The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. — Curt Sachs
It is a great feeling to know that from a window I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves. And from these gather enough dream to sneak out a back door. — Gregory Corso
And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart I carry your heart [ i carry it in my heart ] — E. E. cummings
Writing Poetry Quotes
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray
When you write a song, most of the words you use are in black and white, and then, from time to time, you use one that’s in color. These words in color are a part of ourselves, because we give them a meaning. If you like, we give them a third dimension. — Jacques Brel
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. — Gilles Deleuze
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg
It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die. — Oliver Burkeman
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. — Dylan Thomas
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. — Sharon Olds
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon. — Linton Kwesi Johnson
Sometimes I wish I was poetic and subtle. I write very bold and blunt and tell it like it is. — Pink
In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music. — Renzo Piano
Beautiful Poetry Quotes
The small man builds cages for everyone he knows While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, Keeps dropping keys all night long For the beautiful rowdy prisoners. — Hafez
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove Dance me to the end of love — Leonard Cohen
The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. — D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew. — Louis Aragon
She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes. — Lord Byron
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is a battle of two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, inferiority and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy and truth. The wolf that wins? The one you feed.
There is no longer beauty except in the struggle. No more masterpieces without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault against the unknown forces in order to overcome them and prostrate them before men. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment. — Maxine Hong Kingston
Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it. — Rumi
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd. — Thomas Mann
Reading Poetry Quotes
Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that. — Rumi
Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything. — David Bowie
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry. — John Taylor Gatto
You have to fight through the bad days in order to earn the best days.
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. — J. Courtney Sullivan
Reading poetry and watching cricket were the sum of my world, and the two are not so far apart as many aesthetes might believe. — Donald Bradman
People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush. — Li-Young Lee
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them. — Joan Aiken
Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder. — Edward Hirsch
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week. — Charles Darwin
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. — Emily Dickinson
What Is Poetry Quotes
If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there. — Kahlil Gibran
What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow! — Sergei Rachmaninoff
Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think. — Horace
Friendship picks you up when the world lets you down.
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. — Allen Ginsberg
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
Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. — Louis de Bernieres
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe — James Dickey
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. — T. S. Eliot
Modern Poetry Quotes
You know I have about the same interest in jewelry as I have in politics, horse racing, modern poetry, and women who need weird excitement – none. — Cary Grant
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life. — John Betjeman
Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did. — Robert Lowell
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this. — Diane Wakoski
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. — W. S. Merwin
The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved. — Franz Grillparzer
The reason modern poetry is difficult is so that the poet's wife cannot understand it. — Wendy Cope
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry. — Randall Jarrell
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published. — Sally Kirkland
The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape? — John C. Ransom
Poetry Is Quotes
With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring. — Oscar Wilde
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. — William Wordsworth
Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy. — Nizar Qabbani
The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else. — Countee Cullen
My idea is to bring happiness, respect, vision, poetry, surrealism and magic [to design]. — Philippe Starck
If you deconstruct Greece, you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you reconstruct her. — Odysseas Elytis
To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown. — Robert Bly
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. — Emily Dickinson
Writing Poems Quotes
I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark. — Andrea Gibson
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. — Raymond Carver
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. — Rumi
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. — Paul Celan
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. — Wislawa Szymborska
Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs. — Kendrick Lamar
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. — Robert Frost
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. — James Fenton
As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery. — Robert Hayden
But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. — Aldous Huxley
The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is … political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act. — Amiri Baraka
We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. — John Steinbeck
Will you love me in December as you do in May,
Will you love me in the good old fashioned way?
When my hair has all turned gray,
Will you kiss me then and say,
That you love me in December as you do in May? — Jimmy Walker
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive. — Arnold Palmer
I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. — Judy Collins
I don't know a better preparation for life than a love of poetry and a good digestion. — Zona Gale
The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies. — Mark Twain
Music, when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry. — Mahmoud Darwish
If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. — Anne Bradstreet
One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world. — Valerie Worth
The question, O me! so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life? That you are here - that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. — Walt Whitman
I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy. "Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away. — Jane Austen
But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events. — Diane Wakoski
Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies. — June Jordan
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry. — Kenneth Koch
There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers. — Ernest Hemingway
What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive: the white ball sailing up into the sky, reaching its apex, falling and finally dropping to the turf, just the way I planned it. — Arnold Palmer
Marriage is like a golden ring in a chain, whose beginning is a glance and whose ending is eternity. — Kahlil Gibran
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly. — Umberto Eco
I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it’s understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don’t have a clue what they’re on about. — Marcus Mumford
Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith. — W. H. Auden
The similarity between Van Gogh, Haiku poetry, and good photography is the concern for mortality. That things are very fleeting, that there are people who are more sensitive to death than others. The threat of time is of great concern to them. And the camera is a very appropriate instrument for many. — Dennis Stock
In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music. — Jim Morrison
If you find that the reader of popular romances--however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances--goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry. — C. S. Lewis
If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman. — Socrates
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is. — John Steinbeck
Everyone sort of sees his own life and times as being ephemeral. One thinks that everything good or important that happened, happened in the past. But I think that seeing scenes that you are used to, but with the heightening effects of poetry, perhaps makes you value your life and times more than you might otherwise do. — Vikram Seth
Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat. — Osbert Sitwell
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others. — David Mamet
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising. — David Whyte
This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry? — Azar Nafisi
I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why. — Diane Wakoski
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help. — Thom Gunn
Listen to some good poetry. You see? It keeps us from thinking we are only what our blatant appetites describe us as. — Maya Angelou
The Canadian people are more practical than imaginative. Romantic tales and poetry would meet with less favour in their eyes than a good political article from their newspapers. — Susanna Moodie
The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places.The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Good religious poetry... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout. — A. E. Housman
I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to. — Maya Angelou
There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop. — Augustus William Hare
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of good poetry quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about good poetry to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of good poetry quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
