Adrienne Rich:

The moment of change is the only poem.

Aristotle:

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

Carl Sandburg:

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Denise Levertov:

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Denise Levertov:

A poetry articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record.

Emily Dickinson:

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 emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

Gustave Flaubert:

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

James Branch Cabell:

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

John Adams:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Cage:

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

Leonard Cohen:

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

Marge Piercy:

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

Braided Lives

Plato:

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry.

The Conservative

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some 20 or 30 farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Robert Frost:

A poem begins with a lump in the throat.

Robert Frost:

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert Frost:

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Robert Penn Warren:

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see --i t is, rather, a light by which we may see -- and what we see is life.

Rollo May:

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

Virginia Woolf:

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Wilfred Owen:

All the poet can do today is warn.
That is why true Poets must be truthful.