Favorite Poetry Quotes

Quotes on Poetry and Writing: " Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes."   - Joseph Roux                           "Poetry is a blind date with enchantment."   - J. Patrick Lewis "Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."       - Robert Frost "Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child." - Carl Sandburg " I wish all our clever young poets would remember by homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose equals words in their best order; poetry equals the best words in the best order."   - Samuel Taylor Coleridge    "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of Imagination."   - Keats             "The longing for the dance stirs in the buried life."                                        - Stanley Kunitz from, "Touch Me"   " I have walked through many lives, some of them my              own, and I am not who I was."                                                    - Stanley Kunitz, " The Layers" " I thought poems were songs for people with bad voices."  - Lorna Dee Cervantes " When I see you, it is not so much your physical shape, but the company of two riders, your pure fire devotion, and your love for the one who teaches you."   - Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks "Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects." -Lilian Moore "When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." - John F. Kennedy           "Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense."-  Norman O. Brown "The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation." - James Fenton                    "Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors."                     - Jose' Ortega Y Gasset   "Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild."-  Denis Diderot " A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true."  - W. H. Auden "A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words." - Robert Frost " Never forget that the subject is as important as your feeling; the mud puddle itself is as important as your pleasure in looking at it or splashing through it. Never let the mud puddle get lost in the poetry-because, in many ways, the mud puddle is the poetry." - - Valerie Worth "If there would be a recipe for a poem, these would be the ingredients: word sounds, rhythm, description, feeling, memory, rhyme, and imagination. They can be put together a thousand different ways, a thousand, thousand... more." - Karla Kuskin "The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightening and the lightening bug." - Mark Twain                                                                                                "The poem is a confession of faith." - Emerson      "This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it  'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped ' not at this address.' Just keep looking for the right address." - Barbara Kingsolver " The most valuable of talents is never using two words when one will do." -Thomas Jefferson "Talent is long on patience, and originality, an effort of will and of intense observation." - Flaubert "But, the natural world is the old river than runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores." - Mary Oliver, Poetry Handbook "Begin to weave and God will give you the thread." - German Proverb