Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.  ~ Khalil Gibran


All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. ~ Oscar Wilde


A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~ Oscar Wilde


Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~ Robert Frost


A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
~ W. H. Auden


Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
~ Robert Frost


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


A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~ Paul Valery


Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
~ Carl Sandburg


The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. 
~  Gilbert K. Chesterton


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


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~ Plato


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

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


Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~ Leonard Cohen


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

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


No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers. ~ Horace


Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
~ Plutarch 
 

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
~ E. M. Forster


Always be a poet, even in prose. ~ Charles Baudelaire


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


Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject. ~ John Keats


Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand. ~ Plato


Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.
~ Rita Dove


Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
~ Novalis


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


It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~ Stephen Mallarme