Quotes about Poetry
I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
For it is not meters, but a metermaking argument that makes a poem—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of all the things that men may heed 'Tis most of love they sing indeed.
- JRR Tolkien
He does not write at all whose poems no man reads
- Marcus Aurelius
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poets like Shakespeare know more about poetry than any $25 an hour man.
- Robert Frost
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
- John Updike
There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.
- George Eliot
A great poet ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings... to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.
- William Wordsworth
New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.
- Samuel Johnson
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
- Aristotle