I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could…

There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around.…

— C.D. Wright

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

— Jean Cocteau

Poetry is like air. It's one of the necessary things. Everyone benefits from poetry. And as you know, poetry is international. There are only…

— Nikki Giovanni

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the…

— Conrad Aiken

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical…

— James Fenton

We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the…

— Jacqueline Woodson

I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.

— Anne Waldman

“These men seem not to know that poetry has its particular rules and precepts; and that history is governed by others directly opposite.”

— Lucian of Samosata

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

— Emily Dickinson

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The…

— Robert Frost

I love that people want to know about poetry. It's one of the ways of keeping alive.

— Joan Larkin

You'll never know that you had all of me. You'll never know the poetry you've stirred in me.

— Kate Bush

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

— Emily Dickinson

“Don't know what poetry is even. Must be in a certain mood.”

— James Joyce

One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear.

— Mary Oliver