A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost
*(couldn’t resist including this one!)*
I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
~Edith Södergran
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
~Yevgeny Yentushenko
Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. ~James Branch Cabell
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric;
of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
- William Butler Yeats
Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.
- Robert Lowell
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. ~Thomas Gray
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. ~Robert Frost
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with
emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
- Paul Engle
You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you. ~Joseph Joubert
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand
- Plato
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard
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
