"All the arts come from God and are to be respected as divine inventions," – John Calvin
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
A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity; he is continually informing and filling some other body," – Keats (1818)
Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge - William Wordsworth
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand - Plato
"The audience for social poetry is here and waiting on poetry speaking to the new evolving political rhythms of our existence, divorced of obscure references, mythic Greek figures and greeting card mush," - Soul Cadence and the Social Poet, Mark Antony Rossi
No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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 - W. H. Auden
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, and tell them: and the truth of truths is love - Philip James Bailey
A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable and should be secured, they seldom return" - Francis Bacon
There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know – William Cowper (The Task)
Not every poem's good because it's ancient,
Nor mayst thou blame it just because it's new,
Fair critics test, and prove, and so pass judgment;
Fools praise or blame as they hear others do. -- Buddhist poem
"The rationalizations to side-step social writing are legion and usually summed up in a cowardly proclamation: ‘everything's been said’. As if the great writers of old could have divined the astounding technological advances that shape and shatter the modern human condition. True it is that every age has spoken its peace and poetry, but we must now speak our own modern perceptions with renewed commitment if today's masses are to grasp something more vital than the latest shopping mall fragrance. To combat soul sucking apathy artists should be driven to insult saccharine ramblings disguised as relevance. Instruct video fed citizens to view life beyond the screen. Invigor senses long-since asleep at the wheel of lazy wealth. Poets are not born to be silent. They are born to care and are provided with heightened arrays of instinct and instruments to shape far and away landscapes dying for mercy and magic and all the beauty poems expressing compassionate dignity can ignite. I believe poets can move mountains, move them with the power of stubborn faith and action inherent in all true artistic talent. A peaceful army screaming wherever liberty is molested, dreaming into reality the consequences of body and soul; marshalling emotions desensitized by occupational rote. The deadened feelings once known, but yesterday, when words were magical doorways to justice and jubilee, "," - Soul Cadence and the Social Poet, Mark Antony Rossi
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese - Gilbert K. Chesterton
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses - Jean Cocteau
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash Cohen Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful -
Rita Dove Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words -
Paul Engle A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself -
E. M. Forster To be a poet is a condition, not a profession -
Robert Frost A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland -
Kahlil Gibran Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure -
A. E. Housman 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 Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood -
T. S. Eliot Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth -
Samuel Johnson Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo -
Don Marquis Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason -
Novalis Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own -
Salvatore Quasimodo 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 To have great poets, there must be great audiences -
Walt Whitman Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words -
Robert Frost A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom -
Robert Frost The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past
- Robert Frost There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either -
Robert Graves Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn -
Thomas Gray You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you -
Joseph Joubert Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance -
John Keats Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition -
Eli Khamarov A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul," -
Soren Kierkegaard It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things -
Stephen Mallarme 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 the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits -
Carl Sandburg Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance -
Carl Sandburg Poetry is the journal of the sea