Quotes about Poetry
For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.
— Washington Irving
How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
— Dorothy Sayers
Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The adventitious beauty of poetry may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in the poem.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 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