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Quotes about poetry

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The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils’ party without knowing it.
William Blake1757–1827The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)
I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard1937–2025The Real Thing (1982), Act II, scene V
- Writing
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.
Matthew Arnold1822–1888Introduction to Ward’s English Poets (1880)
- Religion
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Nature (1836), Nature
- Nature
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), Part II
Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations — many rare combinations.
To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.
Walt Whitman1819–1892Complete Prose Works (1892), III. Notes Left Over 3. Ventures, on an Old Theme, p.324
Science is the poetry of reality.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941The Enemies of Reason, “Slaves to Superstition” [1.01], 13 August 2007, timecode 00:38:16ff
- Science
‘Tis verse that gives
Immortal youth to mortal maids.
Walter Savage Landor1775–1864“Verse” (“Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives”)
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
Rachel Carson1907–1964Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952)
- Writing
Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
Jean Cocteau1889–1963On Invisibility
- Morality
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet’s dream.
William Wordsworth1770–1850Elegiac Stanzas. Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, st. 4 (wr. 1805; pub. 1807)
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
William Morris1834–1896The Earthly Paradise (1868), “An Apology”, ll. 22–23
The world’s history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word.
James A. Garfield1831–1881The Province of History (c. 1856), Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 620
- History
You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862Journal (26 January 1840)
A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
José Martí1853–1895Dedication of the Statue of Liberty (1887)