Poetry Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old poetry quotes, poetry sayings, and poetry proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Poetry is language in orbit. Seamus Heaney
Poetry is words in space, representing words in time. Glyn Maxwell
Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. Dana Gioia
Poetry is a verdict that others give to language that is charged with music and rhythm and authority. Leonard Cohen
Poetry is like standing on the edge of a lake on a moonlit night and the light of the moon is always pointing straight at you. Bill Collins
Poetry is a thief that comes in the middle of a new day, while the critics are still studying by night light. James Liddy
Poetry expresses the newness of the day. Adam Zagajewski
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language. Peter Porter
Poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader, or that reader sitting within herself in a theater. Harold Bloom
A lot of poetry is a kind of soliloquy—and therefore one has no audience. Sorley Maclean
Poetry—any art— has a psychic function, fulfilling a need in the individual artist, so that it would be produced even if there was no immediate audience. Thomas Kinsella
Poetry is an endeavor so large and so deeply communal that if one person doesn't write a great poem, eventually somebody else will. Jane Hirschfield
If there is an audience for poetry, it is an audience of privacy. Who isn't appalled to find someone else standing in the poetry section of a bookstore? Dean Young
Poetry, like crime, can only be accomplished in absolute privacy and secrecy. Franz Wright
If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. John Keats
Science sees signs; Poetry, the thing signified. Augustus and Julius Hare
We can read poetry, and recite poetry, but to live poetry is the symphony of life. S. Frances Foote
Poetry is a language which tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said. Edwin Robinson
Poetry alone imagines, and imagining creates the world that people can wish to live in and make true. Archibald MacLeish
You arrive at truth through poetry; I arrive at poetry through the truth. Joseph Joubert
The great things in poetry are song at the core, but externally mere speech. Arthur Symons