Poetry Is Not a Turning Loose of Emotion, but an Escape from Emotion; It Is Not the Expression

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

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

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. T. S. Eliot

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

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

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

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

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. Leonard Cohen Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. William Hazlitt

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment. Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. Samuel Johnson

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. Novalis

To have great poets, there must be great audiences. Walt Whitman

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. Jean Cocteau

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry: the best words in the best order. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know. Andre Gide

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. Jean Cocteau Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. John Keats

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. Eli Khamarov

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. Charles Simic

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. Paul Dirac

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry. Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing. William Stanley Merwin

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know this is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? Emily Dickinson

Poetry...is...a speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight. Sir Philip Sydney