80+ Beautiful Poetry Quotes To Share With Students (2024)

Poetry is powerful. It’s among the most creative forms of self-expression. The message shared between the writer and reader can range from fun and playful to profound and intimate, even when communicated with just a few short words. We’ve put together this list of poetry quotes that beautifully capture why poems mean so much to so many!

Quotes About Poetry as Language

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. —Plato

You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart. —Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. —Rita Dove

Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. —Mary Oliver

Everything you invent is true: You can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry. —Julian Barnes

“Therefore” is a word the poet must not know. —Andre Gide

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness. —Alice Walker

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals. —Sylvia Plath

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. —W. H. Auden

Poets are shameless with their experiences: They exploit them. —Friedrich Nietzsche

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity. —Samuel Beckett

Always be a poet, even in prose. —Charles Baudelaire

A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep. —Salman Rushdie

All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, “Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.” —Sonia Sanchez

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. —Plutarch

It is a test [that] genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. —T. S. Eliot

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius. —George Edward Woodberry

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. —Allen Ginsberg

The crown of literature is poetry. —W. Somerset Maugham

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. —Paul Engle

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause. —Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning. —Stanley Kunitz

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. —Plato

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination. —Ishmael Reed

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry. —Victor Hugo

The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. —Ernest Hemingway

Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it. —Rumi

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. —Robert Frost

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. —Stephane Mallarme

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. —Aristotle

Quotes About Poetry as Emotion

Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief—everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies. —F. Sionil Jose

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. —Khalil Gibran

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. —Dylan Thomas

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: It takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. —William Wordsworth

Don’t write love poems when you’re in love. Write them when you’re not in love. —Richard Hugo

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. —Robert Frost

Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow. —A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. —Oscar Wilde

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings. —W. H. Auden

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

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. —Robert Frost

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. —Thomas Hardy

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

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. —Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite impressions. —Philibert Joseph Roux

Quotes About Poetry as Metaphors

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. —Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. —Edgar Allan Poe

It was at that age that poetry came in search of me. —Pablo Neruda

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. —Carl Sandburg

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. —Emily Dickinson

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. —Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. —Robert Frost

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. —June Jordan

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. —Emily Dickinson

The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies and sparkle in its brightness. —James Gates Percival

The poet is the priest of the invisible. —Wallace Stevens

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere. —Henry David Thoreau

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does. —Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. —Audre Lorde

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings and making music with them. —Dennis Gabor

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. —Thomas Gray

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer. … He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. —E. B. White

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. —Don Marquis

All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart. —Edith Sitwell

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon. —Linton Kwesi Johnson

Other Quotes About Poetry

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. —T. S. Eliot

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet. —Bob Dylan

You must have a certain amount of maturity to be a poet. Seldom do sixteen-year-olds know themselves well enough. —Erica Jong

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters. … But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk. —Charles Baudelaire

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful, you find coexistence; it breaks walls down. —Mahmoud Darwish

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry. —Emily Dickinson

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. —Wilfred Owen

Poetry—but what is poetry. —Wislawa Szymborska

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. —Georges Braque

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me. —Eugenio Montale

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur. —Diane Ackerman

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. —Robert Grave

Oh, speak no ill of poetry, for ’tis a holy thing. —Lydia Huntley Sigourney

It takes a lot of desperation, dissatisfaction, and disillusion to write a few good poems. —Charles Bukowski

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? —Virginia Woolf

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. —Percy Bysshe Shelley

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