Great Quotations about Poetry

Poetry is the last comfort of the bewildered

…Paula Meehan

..a poem is never finished, only abandoned..

...Paul Valéry...

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

Stephen Mallarme

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul."

..Soren Kierkegaard

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

Thomas Gray.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Robert Frost

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.

Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Aristotle, On Poetics

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Novalis

The line between great poetry and intergalactic space aliens is admittedly fine, but it remains a line nonetheless.

Helen Vendler

The poet is not a person, he is only a spirit

Even if he is blind, like Homer

Or, like Beethoven, deaf

He sees everything, he hears everything,

And he possesses and uses all of it …

Anna Akhmatova