Quotes on Poetry Is

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.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

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

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.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

Poetry is the thread that leads us out of the labyrinth of despair and into the light.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.

Poetry is a mixture of common sense, which not all have, with an uncommon sense, which very few have.