Art Quote by Wallace Stevens

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

— Anonymous

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

— Voltaire

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

— James Schuyler

It is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is.

— I. A. Richards

“If anything can be said in prose, then poetry should be saved for saying nothing.”

— Pierre Albert-Birot

“But is this not what poetry must do? To say the nothing that cannot be said?”

— John Crowley

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say…

— James Laughlin

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

— Pattiann Rogers

Poetry is not the thing said, but the way of saying it.

— A. E. Housman

Poetry says the things that I can't say. I read a lot, but I never write it.

— Trevor McDonald

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible…

— Robert Frost

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

— Wallace Stevens