Exercise Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths…

— Orson F. Whitney

“Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons…

— Aberjhani

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

— Edgar Allan Poe

The art of poetry is to touch the passions, and its duty to lead them on the side of virtue.

— William Cowper

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance…

— Matthew Arnold

“Poetry is man’s best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.”

— John Ciardi

Good poetry is like effective prayer, it feeds the human spirit, it nourishes, it puts us in touch with forces far greater than ourselves

— Lorna Goodison

“Poetry is the insistent roaring of the human soul.”

— Pietros Maneos

It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge,…

— Guy Davenport

“Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry affords us a respite in which we may gather renewed strength for the old struggle to adapt ourselves to reality.

— Robert Haven Schauffler