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| Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. | | T.S. Eliot | |
| Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech. | | Henry David Thoreau | |
| I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. | | Socrates | |
| I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it | | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | |
| I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. | | Robert Frost | |
| I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. | | T.S. Eliot | |
| I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again. | | Oscar Wilde | |
| In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well | | Paul Valery | |
| It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music. | | Voltaire | |
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| It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -- that is a life. | | T.S. Eliot | |
| Judges, like the criminal classes, have their lighter moments | | Oscar Wilde | |
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| Means not, but blunders round about a meaning; And he whose fustian's so sublimely bad, It is not poetry, but prose run mad | | Alexander Pope | |
| Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, which cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet and artist has actually expressed | | Nathaniel Hawthorne | |
| One merit of poetry few persons will deny; it says more, and in few words, than prose | | Voltaire | |
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. | | William Shakespeare | |
| Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. | | Plato | |
| Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses only a particle of it. | | Henry David Thoreau | |
