I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
- Russell Baker
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Always be a poet, even in prose.
- Charles Baudelaire
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God is the perfect poet.
- Robert Browning
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
- John Cage
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A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
- Rene Char
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The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
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You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
- John Ciardi
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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
- Jean Cocteau
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
- Jean Cocteau
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A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
- Jean Cocteau
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
- Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
- Leonard Cohen
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A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
- Samuel McChord Crothers
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Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
- Rita Dove
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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
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Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
- T. S. Eliot
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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
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
- Gustave Flaubert
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
- Edward M. Forster
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Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
- Robert Frost
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Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
- Robert Frost
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A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
- Robert Frost
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To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
- Robert Frost
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Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.
- Dennis Gabor
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A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.
- Kahlil Gibran
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Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
- Kahlil Gibran
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"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.
- Andre Gide
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There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
- Robert Graves
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Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
- Thomas Gray
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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
- Thomas Hardy
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Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
- William Hazlitt
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No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
- Horace
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Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
- A. E. Housman
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Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.
- Samuel Johnson
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You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.
- Joseph Joubert
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Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
- John Keats
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Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
- Eli Khamarov
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Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
- Thomas B. Macaulay
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Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
- Don Marquis
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Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.
- Marianne Moore
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Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.
- Alfred de Musset
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Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
- Novalis
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Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
- Plato
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Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
- Edgar Allan Poe
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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
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The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.
- Richard Rosen
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Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
- Joseph Roux
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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
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He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.
- George Sand
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Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
- Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
- Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.
- Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
- Carl Sandburg
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I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
- Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
- Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
- Charles Simic
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Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.
- Charles Simic
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
- Wallace Stevens
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You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. 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
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The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
- Lionel Trilling
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A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- Paul Valery
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The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."
- Robert Penn Warren
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The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see-it is, rather, a light by which we may see-and what we see is life.
- Robert Penn Warren
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A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
- E. B. White
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To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
- Walt Whitman
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A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
- Oscar Wilde
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He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.
- Oscar Wilde
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All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
- Oscar Wilde
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A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
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