Great Poetry Quotes

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking. ~ Alice Oswald

Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer. ~ Jean Houston

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

The great Poetry that creates out of the soul of humankind is inaccurately explained if we reduce it to the personal ~ C. G. Jung

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.' ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams. ~ Gaston Bachelard

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate. ~ James Fenton

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian. ~ Donna Tartt

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. ~ Samuel Johnson

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The Offices rerooted me in a tradition where, monk or not, I would always be at home. From long ago I knew the power of their repetition, the incantatory force of the Psalms. But they had an added power now. As a kid, the psalmist (or psalmists) had seemed remote to me, the Psalms long prayers which sometimes rose to great poetry but often had simply to be endured. For a middle-aged man, the psalmists' moods and feelings came alive. One of the voices sounded a lot like a modern New Yorker, me or people I knew: a manic-depressive type A personality sometimes up, more often down, sometimes resigned, more often pissed off, railing about his sneaky enemies and feckless friends, always bitching to the Lord about the rotten hand he'd been dealt. That good old changelessness. ~ Tony Hendra

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~ Novalis

There are some people who cannot help giving. Why? Because they experience a real psychological pleasure in doing so. They don't do it with an eye to their own advantage, they do it on the quiet; they detest doing it openly because that would take away some of the satisfaction. They do it in secret, with quick trembling hands, their breasts rocked by a spiritual well being which they do not themselves understand. ~ Knut Hamsun

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation. ~ Bayard Taylor

What is great poetry, after all, but the continuation of the human voice after death? ~ Erica Jong

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English. ~ Victor Hugo

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. ~ T. S. Eliot

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse. ~ Alice Walker

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart. ~ Helen Keller

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy. ~ Joseph Alexander Leighton

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

Think of the great poetry, the music and dance and ritual that spring forth from our aspiring to a life beyond death. Maybe these things are justification enough for our hopes and dreams, although I wouldn't say that to a dying man. ~ Don DeLillo

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ~ Emily Dickinson

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves ... The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes. ~ Harold Bloom

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did. ~ Sarah Kay

In Bonn, where I studied for a year, I changed from classical to Romance philology, taught there by its great founder, F. Diez, and at the beginning of 1852, I received the doctorate for a dissertation on the refrain in Provencal poetry. ~ Paul Heyse

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture. ~ Dana Gioia

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence. ~ Harry Mathews

As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death." ~ Andrew Davies

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century. ~ Jay Parini

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. ~ James Tate

This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday. ~ Thornton Wilder

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart ... ~ Edith Sitwell

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul - and ambiguity, for that matter - out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. ~ Charles Baxter

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. ~ Milan Kundera

a poem is never finished, only abandoned, ~ Clive James

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends. ~ David Whyte

You come from the depths of infinity
and from all directions of space-time.
Every atom in you comes
from a different star,
every cell are made
of celestial radiation.
You're the smile of
no birth and no death.
You are the Great Poetry. ~ Alexis Karpouzos

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does. ~ Robert Morgan

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire. ~ Kenneth Clark

Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart. ~ Helen Keller

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. ~ David Whyte

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

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me. ~ Jennifer McMahon

The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. ~ Robert Morgan

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry. ~ Andrew Motion

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be. ~ Mark Strand

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations. ~ Horace Walpole

Life is a great poetry.
To live it at its best
Write a love story
And be a great poet.

Life is a great poetry.
To love it at its best
Love everyone earnestly,
Without judging for a crest.

Life is a great poetry.
To live it at its best
Create a great history
Before going for the rest.

Life is a great poetry.
To paint it at its best
Through colors openly
As if, life is not a test.

Life is a great poetry.
To enjoy it at its best
Enjoy a golden dusk party
When birds return to nest. ~ Debasish Mridha

We should be familiar with the great histories, the great biographies. We should be familiar with the great success stories, the great love stories, the great philosophies. It would also be a good idea to memorize potent passages from great poetry and other literary works. Our literature also may give us extra, pleasant hours as well as furnish contrasts and comparisons which may help us to evaluate and direct our own lives. ~ Sterling W. Sill

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest. ~ Harry Mathews

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose. ~ Walter Savage Landor

It is a pity that no one in Paris bothered to quote Coleridge, who wrote, long before cubism, that the true poet is able to reduce 'succession to an instant.' Simultaneity in this sense is the property of all great poetry. ~ LeRoy C. Breunig

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry. ~ Khaled Hosseini

I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read. ~ Edward Hirsch

I am not ridiculing verbal mechanisms, dreams, or repressions as origins of poetry; all three of them and more besides may have a great deal to do with it. ~ Allen Tate

Mr. Yeats makes great poetry out of what he calls his unhappiness about me, and he is happy in that. - Maud Gonne ~ Orna Ross

Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others. ~ Bryant McGill

You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry. ~ Felix Dennis

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

In all great poetry there is a kind of 'kenosis' of the understanding, a self-emptying of the tongue. Here language points away from itself to something greater than itself. ~ L.P. Jacks

Great men should not have great faults. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The care of a wise and good man for his only son is inferior to the regard of the great Parent of the universe for his creatures. ~ John Woolman

Once I am aware of what has been on my mind and have established ways to respond in faith with a particular prayer, sacred word, or silence before God, my anxious thoughts lose a great deal of their power. ~ Ed Cyzewski

The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood - rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky - they all turn out in one day. ~ David Byrne

Persuasion is not a science but an art ~ William Bernbach

Occasionally there is a moment in a person's life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment. For a split second he comes into a kind of cosmic understanding. For a trembling breath of time he knows all there is to know. He is loaned the gift the poet yearned for - seeing himself as others see him. ~ Betty Smith

It signifies that the great judge of the dead looks down on men to see that justice is done and that truth prevails. So I commend you to the good Osiris; ~ R. Austin Freeman

History's smell.
Like old roses on a breeze.
It would lurk forever in ordinary things. In coat hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes. ~ Arundhati Roy

We cannot do great deeds unless we're willing to do the small things that make up the sum of greatness. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

In real life, if I were firing you, I'd tell you what a great job you did, how fantastic you are, and how you can do better someplace else. If somebody steals, that's different, but generally speaking, you want to let them down as lightly as possible. It's not a very pleasant thing. I don't like firing people. ~ Donald Trump

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self. ~ Harold Bloom

I know of nothing that I feel is of so great value in life as to be obedient to the counsel and advice of the Lord, and of His servants in this our day. ~ Heber J. Grant

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

She still cared for me, and the best way I could make amends to her was to be happy.
I do have a knack for finding great women. ~ Craig Ferguson

She lives as if she is constantly on the brink of some great fulfillment. As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away "from all this". All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else? ~ Erica Jong

I want to concentrate on winning things with Barcelona and Argentina. Then if people want to say nice things about me when I have retired, great. Right now, I need to concentrate on being part of a team - not just on me. ~ Lionel Messi

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem. ~ Lucille Clifton

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. ~ Jack Gilbert

I think I tended toward the Russian training because my first teacher taught a version of Vaganova, and it was drilled into me that that was the best system, and also at the time there were a lot of great Russian stars. ~ Sascha Radetsky

History will be erased in the universal purgatory. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway. ~ Duane Michals

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. ~ Stephen King

it was the kind of moon
that I would want to
send back to my ancestors
and gift to my descendants

so they know that I too,
have been bruised...by beauty. ~ Sanober Khan

The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action. ~ H.G.Wells

I was lucky enough to see the original cast of 'In the Heights.' This one blew my mind. The infusion of Latin, hip hop and rap with musical theatre, great storytelling and talent was a powerful combination to me during a time when I'd not been moved by much! ~ Josh Young

Service is the virtue that distinguished the great of all times and which they will be remembered by. It places a mark if nobility upon its disciples. It is the dividing line which separates the two great groups of the world - those who help and those who hinder, those who lift and those who lean, those who contribute and those who only consume. How much better it is to give than to receive. Service in any form is comely and beautiful. To give encouragement, to impart sympathy, to show interest, to banish fear, to build self confidence and awaken hope in the hearts if others, in short - to love them and to show it - is to render the most precious service. ~ Bryant S. Hinckley

Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss up. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

I started as a drummer, so I sort of took on singing duties by default. I had sung backgrounds and some lead vocals from behind the drums in different bands that I'd been in, and I'd gotten great responses for the songs I would sing. I really started pursuing the possibility of being a lead singer based on the fact that I was working a full-time restaurant job and then playing gigs at night, hauling drums around. One day, it just dawned on me that, 'Hey, I could be in a band and be the singer, and it would be a lot easier!' ~ Chris Cornell

Nobody ever launched an attack without having misgivings beforehand, You ought to have misgivings before; but when the moment of action is come, the hour of misgivings is passed. It is often not possible to go backward from a course which has been adopted in war. A man must answer "Aye" or "No" to the great questions which are put, and by that decision he must be bound. ~ Winston Churchill

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

He had never been an unhappy man; his own temper had secured him from that, even in his first marriage; but his second must shew him how delightful a well-judging and truly amiable woman could be, and must give him the pleasantest proof of its being a great deal better to choose than to be chosen, to excite gratitude than to feel it. He ~ Jane Austen

I was the Chair of the WIFF Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Women In Film. The foundation runs the several programs including one that provide our film finishing fund. So we help women complete their films with a grant from Netflix. It's great to be associated with award winning films like 'Freeheld' and 'Circumstance'. ~ Sharon Lawrence

Placing religious beliefs above law is a great recipe for destruction of entire human race. ~ Ketan Waghmare

T.S. Eliot said to me 'There's only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn't matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it's in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.' What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences – and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character. ~ Ted Hughes