Poetry Quotes

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

— John Updike

“I like poems that are little games.”

— Peter Davison

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”

— Rita Dove

“I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.”

— Russell Baker

“You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.”

— Lena Dunham

“You don't have to suffer to be a poet adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.”

— John Ciardi

“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

“Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.”

— Mark Strand

“If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.”

— Wallace Stevens

“I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.”

— Carol Ann Duffy

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.”

— John Ruskin

“Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.”

— Gustave Flaubert

“Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”

— Wallace Stevens

“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.”

— Vincent Van Gogh

“But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.”

— Diane Wakoski