August Quote by Joseph Alexander Leighton

Poetry is the way into a spiritual vision of society and the universe.

— Camille Paglia

Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They…

— Stanley Kunitz

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

— Jacques Maritain

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

— Anonymous

The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

— Henry David Thoreau

Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

— Dana Gioia

“I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the…

— Audre Lorde

Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion.

— William Wordsworth

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of…

— Annie Dillard

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

— Diane Wakoski