Here is a collection of quotes about poetry and poetry writing from famous poets and writers. The quotes can provide inspiration for writers creating their own poems. They can also provide insight into the art of poetry.

Robert Frost: "A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

Dr. Seuss: "The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific." source

Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it." - "A Defense of Poetry" (source)

Pablo Neruda: "Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread."

Robert Graves: "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either." (source)

Dylan Thomas: "Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own."

Oscar Wilde: "A poet can survive everything but a misprint." (source)

Emily Dickinson: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?" (source)

Carl Sandburg: "Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance."

Robert Frost: "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

William Wordsworth: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity."

John Keats: "The poetry of the earth is never dead."

T.S. Eliot: "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." (source)

E.E. Cummings: "Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters." (source)

Robert Frost: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." - from the essay, "The Figure a Poem Makes" - (source)

Edgar Allan Poe: "I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth." (Source)

Henry David Thoreau: "This world is but a canvas to our imagination."

Carl Sandburg: "Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension." - Tentative (First Model): Definitions of Poetry source)

You might also find our Quotes about Writing page interesting.