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Bryant McGill, Stanford Lectures on Poetry, 1990

I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. – Russell Baker
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. – T. S. Eliot
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. – Kahlil Gibran
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. – Socrates
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business. – Henry David Thoreau
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. – John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. – Adrian Mitchell
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech. – Simonides
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote. – Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko
A vein of poetry exists in the hearts of all men. – Thomas Carlyle
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry. – R.Z. Sheppard, book critic
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. – Oscar Wilde
All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. – G. K. Chesterton
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. – Charles Baudelaire
Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry. – Charles Baudelaire
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances on the concertina, will admit that even suicide has its brighter aspects. – Stephen Leacock, 1912
Courtly love-poetry may first have been written during long periods of abstinence on the Crusades, but it would not have flourished in the cold of northern Europe without some help from the chimney. – James Burke
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream- a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows- is essentially poetry. – Jesse Louis Jackson
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T. S. Eliot
Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech. – Henry David Thoreau
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. – Socrates, In "Apology," sct. 21, by Plato.
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say. – Jean Cocteau
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 Adams

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