Quotes about poetry
150 quotes from 90 people
Archibald MacLeish1892–1982“Ars Poetica”, Collected Poems, 1917-1982 (1985)
John Keats1795–1821Poems (1817)
John Adams1735–1826Letter to John Quincy Adams (14 May 1781)
Robert Graves1895–1985Reply to questionnaire, “The Cost of Letters” in Horizon (September 1946)
William Hazlitt1778–1830Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Lecture I, “On Poetry in General”
Joseph Roux1834–1905Meditations of a Parish Priest (1866), Part 1, LXXIWriting free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost1874–1963Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts (May 17, 1935)Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822A Defence of Poetry (1821)Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
Denis Diderot1713–1784On Dramatic Poetry (1758)A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Burns (1828).God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
Robert Browning1812–1889Paracelsus (1835), Part 2.To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
Colette1873–1954Paris From My Window (1944)A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.
Robert Graves1895–1985The Paris Review, “Writers at Work: 4th series,” interview with Peter Buckman and William Fifield (1969)My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), FridayA true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau1889–1963A Call to Order (1926)