Poetry | Poetry Quotes | Poem Quotations | Motivational Quotes On Poetry

Poetry is a special mode of expressing one’s feelings in an impressive way. The emotions of a person can be expressed through poetry with his choicest words to reach the heart of the readers. Persons with an inclination for enjoying the nuances in literature find poetry as the correct mode of describing deeper thoughts.

Poetry not only expresses the poet’s feelings in a distinctive way but there is an admirable feature in poems which convey to the readers with awesome rhythmic prosody which keeps them psychologically attached to the every line of the poem. Phonetics play a pivotal role in framing the poetic lines and they form the main attraction of poetic expression and some of them even form a basis for sartorial musical tunes.

The classic example to have attained the celebrity status across the world is the nursery rhyme which has an admirable feature of synchronous phonetics as given below:

                                                          "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little STAR,

                                                           How I wonder what you ARE,

                                                          Up above the world so HIGH

                                                          Like a diamond in the SKY."

If we observe the last words in each successive pair of lines, we notice an amazing similitude in the sounds they produce while uttering. This is the most common feature in all the poems. However, the most outstanding feature in the rhyme is the last words in each line. “Star and Are”, “High and Sky” resonate with remarkable sameness of rhythm in spite of gross difference in their spellings. We do not undergo the same degree of excitement if observe the lines ending with the words like “love and dove” and “long and strong” because though the words produce the same rhythmic sound, they fail to retain the interest of the readers because of the sameness in the spelling in the last three letters viz., “ ove”, “ong” .

We come across the distinct use of rhyming words in alternate lines, when we read the poem “The Brook” by Lord Tennyson as quoted below:

                                                           "Till last by Philip’s farm I flow

                                                            To join the brimming river,

                                                            For men may come and men may go,

                                                            But I go on for ever."

Though the above stanza has the appreciable use of words “flow and go” and “river and ever”, we find a number of words rhyming uniformly but they have homogeneity in the last syllables like “down and town” and “ridges and bridges” in other stanzas of the same poem. However, this does not undermine the supreme literary skills and the brilliant assonance and expressive power of Lord Tennyson.

 Poems are the proper medium through which extremities of a poet’s sincere thoughts can be described with adequate intensity. The deepest emotions of love, affection, endearment, beauty of nature, worship, admiration, delectation, ecstasy, jubilation, grief, melancholy, agony, wrath, rebellion, encouragement etc., can be imbued ineffaceably in the minds of readers by poetry.

Needless to say, the main theme of poetry during the last several centuries has been consistently predominant with the beauty of nature, involuntary surge of romantic passions from the hearts of poets. The object of poetry has always been the mythical sweetheart of love, in all parts of the world. When an individual reaches the stage of adolescence and youth, he becomes obsessed with strong emotions of romance for imaginary or conspicuous ladylove. It is observed that an ordinary bloke who has no general inborn flair for poetry / literature gets spontaneously charged with amorous feelings once he enters the phase of youth and he begins to express his feelings in a flowery style, much to his own surprise. Ultimately, it is the staunchness of irresistible emotions that makes a lay man a laudable poet.

The legendary saga “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare, replete with poetic renditions, remains an evergreen romantic inspiration for innumerable literary souls that have undying penchant for poetry immersed in amorous love.

We can get to know more about the dominant place occupied by romantic poets, if we consider a few splendid literary works of great poets—“She walks in beauty..” by Lord Byron; “I carry your heart..” by E.E.Cummings;  “I loved you first…” by Christina Rosetti; “Valentine..” by Carol Ann Duffy; “A Glimpse…” by Walt Whitman; “Wanna be yours…” by John Cooper Clarke; “Another Valentine…” by Wendy Cope; “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare; “The Good Morrow…” by John Donne; “Love after love…” by Derek Walcott etc.

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Notwithstanding the poetic world is dominated by romantic poems, there is also an unignorable share of poems pertaining to other genre like beauty of nature, sorrow arisen by departed souls, inspiration to the dejected minds, upholding of moral values, appeasement of crying infants (lullabies), entertainment of kids (nursery rhymes) and the like.

We traverse through the trance of adorable series of sublime thoughts in the magnum opus “Geetanjali” by Rabindranath Tagore, an eminent Nobel laureate of India. Without according much seriousness to the prosody in the lines, he wrote the poetic lines studded with precious words which garnered international acclaim and applause unanimously. His lyrical treatise, even today, is regarded as an invaluable insight into the relation between man and God.

Prominent legendary sonneteers and great scholars embrace poetry as the medium of expressing their pure feelings from the deepest corners of their hearts. A language is kept alive and made to remain ebullient and exuberant eternally in the hands of literary souls alone.

Quotations On Poetry:

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

- Robert Frost

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.”

- Albert Einstein

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”

- Edgar Allan Poe

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.”

- Plutarch

“Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.”

- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”

 - Jean Cocteau

“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

- Carl Sandburg

“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

“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.”

- Edgar Allan Poe

“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

“Wine is bottled poetry.”

- Robert Louis Stevenson

“The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.”

- James Gates Percival

“Personality is everything in art and poetry.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”

 -Audre Lorde

“Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.”

- Umberto Eco

“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”

- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”

- Plato

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

- John Keats

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”

- G.K. Chesterton

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”

- Leonardo da Vinci

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.”

- Kahlil Gibran

“History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.”

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”

- Robert Frost

“A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.”

-C. K. Williams

“The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

-Mata Hari

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“The moment of change is the only poem.”

- Adrienne Rich

“Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.”

- Mark Strand

“I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.”

- Tahar Ben Jelloun

“A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.”

- David Whyte

“Poetry lies its way to the truth.”

- John Ciardi

“The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe”

- Jonathan Galassi

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”

- William Wordsworth

“Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!”

- Lord Byron

“some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.”

- Charles Bukowski

“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”

- Rita Dove

“Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.”

- Joseph Roux

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

- W.H. Auden

“Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.”

 - Carl Sandburg

“ 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

“Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it.”

 - Rumi

“Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.”

- Dennis Gabor

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

- Emily Dickinson

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

- W.H. Auden

“Poetry is an act of peace.”

 - Pablo Neruda

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”

- Christopher Morley

“Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its divine origin.”

- Beecher

“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

“If you can’t be a poet, be the poem.”

 - David Carradine

“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”

- Paul Valery

“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

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”

- David Carradine

“And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

-Walt Whitman

“Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.”

- Cassandra Clare

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

- Pablo Neruda

“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.”

- Kahlil Gibran

“We love the things we love for what they are.”

- Robert Frost

“life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis”

- E.E. Cummings

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

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

- Leonard Cohen

“Dare to love yourself

as if you were a rainbow

with gold at both ends.”

- Aberjhani

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

“The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.”

- Jean Giraudoux

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

-Virginia Woolf

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”

- Emily Dickinson

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

- William Wordsworth

“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.”

- Jim Morrison

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

-Robert Frost

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

“It's not easy to define poetry.”

- Bob Dylan

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

- Percy Bysshe Shelle