Poetry Quote of the Day: Baudelaire

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry."

- Charles Baudelaire

Poetry Quote of the Day from the Movie "Dead Poet's Society"

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

- from Dead Poet's Society

Poetry Quotes of the Day

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."
- Leonard Cohen

"There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know."
- William Cowper

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful."
- Rita Dove

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
- Paul Valery

"A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland."
- Kahlil Gibran

Poetry Quotes of the Day

"Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself." - William Hazlitt

"Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild." - Denis Diderot

"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 lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement . . . says heaven and earth in one word . . . speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time." - Christopher Fry

"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." - Robert Frost

"Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes." - Joseph Roux

"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 write poetry in order to live more fully." - Judith Rodriguez

"Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." William Wordsworth

"When power leads man towards 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 existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses." - President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart." - Peggy Noonan

"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." - Don Marquis

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

"Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows." - Edmund Burke

"Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything." - William Blissett