Poetry Quotes

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

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

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you – like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist – or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.[La poesía es siempre un acto de paz. El poeta nace de la paz como el pan nace de la harina.]

No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.

My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.[Mi poesia nacid entre el cerro y el rio, tomé la voz de la Iluvia, se impregno de los bosques tal como la madera.]

It may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world.

In an opera the poetry must necessarily be the obedient daughter of the music.

If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves of a tree, it had better not come at all.

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

If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.