Civilization Quote by T. S. Eliot

Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of…

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity for our existence. It forms the quality of light from which we predicate our…

— Audre Lorde

Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.

— Emma Lazarus

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

— Octavio Paz

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of…

— Vernon Lee

we need poetry most at those moments when life astounds us with losses, gains, or celebrations. We need it most when we are most…

— Erica Jong

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

— Ezra Pound

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those…

— Adrienne Rich

“The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back…

— David Whyte

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being…

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be.

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The more stringent the rules and the more limiting they are, the more the poet and writer is forced to resort to special techniques…

— Simin Behbahani