A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
Voltaire

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.
Jose Bergamin

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
John Cage

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
Walt Whitman

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.  ~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.  ~Salvatore Quasimodo

You can't write poetry on the computer.  ~Quentin Tarantino

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.  ~Joseph Joubert

The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.  ~Jean Cocteau, Le Rappel á l'ordre, 1926

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.  ~Thomas Gray

He lives the poetry that he cannot write.  The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.  ~Oscar Wilde

You don't have to suffer to be a poet.  Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.  ~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962


Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.  ~William Hazlitt

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  ~T.S. Eliot, Dante, 1920