Poetry Quotes by Famous Poets about Poems

American Poets

Walt Whitman,   Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Robert Frost,  Paul Engle,  Archibald MacLeish,   Charles Simic

English Poets

John Keats,  Robert Browning,  Samuel Taylor Coleridge,  W. H. Auden,  Robert Graves,  Percy Bysshe Shelley,   Horace Walpole

French Poets

Paul Valery,  Alfred de Musset,  George Sand

Ancient Philosphers

Plato & Aristotle

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." 

Poetry Quote by Robert Frost
Famous American Poet (1874-1963)

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."

Poetry Quote by  Robert Frost
Famous American Poet (1874-1963)

"A poem should not mean but be."

Poetry Quote by Archibald MacLeish
American Poet (1892-1982)

"The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both."

Peotry Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Poet (1803-1882)

"Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science."

Poetry Qoute by Sigmund Freud

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

Poetry Quote by Sigmund Freud

"Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."

Poetry Quote by Paul Engle
(1908-1991) University of Iowa

"To have great poets there must be great audiences too."

Poetry Quote by Walt Whitman
American Poet (1819-1892)

"Poetry is an orphan of silence. 
The words never quite equal the experience behind them."

Poetry Quotes by Charles Simic
American Poet born in 1938

 "One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves."

Poetry Quote by W. H. Auden
English and American Poet (1907-1973)

"Peotry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,  and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar."

Poetry Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley
English Poet (1792-1822)

"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."

Poetry Quotes by John Keats
English Poet (1795-1821)

"Poetry ... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."

Poetry Quote by John Keats
English Poet (1795-1821)

"No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language."

Poetry Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
English Poet (1772-1834).

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." 

Poetry Quote by Robert Graves
English Poet (1895-1985)

"A poet who makes use of a worse word instead of a better, because the former fits the rhyme or the measure, though it weakens the sense, is like a jeweler, who cuts a diamond into a brilliant, and diminishes the weight to make it shine more."

Poetry Qoute by Horace Walpole
English Poet (1717-1797)

"God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations."

Poetry Qoute by Robert Browning
Famous English Poet (1812-1889)

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

Poetry Quote by Paul Valery
French Poet (1871-1945)

"He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet,
though he has never written a line in all his life."

Poetry Quote by George Sand
Female French writer who used the pseudonym George Sand (1804-1876)

"Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content."

Poetry Quote by Alfred de Musset
French Romantic Poet (1810-1857)

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

Poetry Quote by Plato

 "Poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."

Poetry Quote by Aristotle

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own."

Poetry Quote by Salvatore Quasimodo
Italian Poet (1901-1968)

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."

Dante Alighiere

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet."

William Blake

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in."

Leonard Cohen

“I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who’s living makes a name."

Emily Dickinson

“A great man is always willing to be little."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on."

Robert Frost