I have wanted to write something more about what poetry is and was researching when I cam across this list so instead of writing a blog I am leaving the list. These are quotes from other poets and are way more likely to get you thinking than my ramblings.
So read, be inspired and find your way to the website link at the top of the page and get involved!
1. Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. ― Joseph Roux
2. Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it. ― Rumi
3. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ― Leonard Cohen
4. Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails 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
5. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ― Emily Dickinson
6. I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. ― Kenneth Rexroth
7. Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ― Dennis Gabor
8. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. ― Carl Sandburg
9. Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. – Rita Dove
10. Poetry is an act of peace. – Pablo Neruda
11. 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
12. Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. – Lawrence Ferlinghetti
13. Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition – Eli Khamarov
14. There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired. — Edward Young
15. If you can’t be a poet, be the poem. – David Carradine
16. 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
17. The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens
18. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. – Percy Byshe Shelley
19. Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. – Christopher Fry
20. The poet doesn’t invent. He listens. – Jean Cocteau
21. There is poetry as soon as we realize we possess nothing. – John Cage
22. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. – Carl Sandburg
23. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. – Robert Frost
24. Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. – James Tate
25. Poetry is frosted fire. – J. Patrick Lewis
26. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T.S. Eliot
27. 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
28. To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. – Robert Frost
29. Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. – Leonardo da Vinci
30. Poetry lies its way to the truth. – John Ciardi
31. For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. – Robert Penn Warren
32. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. – William Butler Yeats
33. Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
34. I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn’t come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem. – Lucille Clifton
35. Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis
36. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. – Carl Sandburg
37. Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. — Nikki Giovanni
38. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents. – William Carlos Williams
39. 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
40. My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. – John Lennon
41. If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb
42. Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ― Virginia Woolf
43. Writing poetry is a state of free float. ― Margaret Atwood
44. There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. ― Gustave Flaubert
45. Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. ― Jack Kerouac
46. A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ― W.H. Auden
47. Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis
48. Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its divine origin. — Beecher
49. The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. ― Christopher Morley
50. The true poem rests between the words. ― Vanna Bonta
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