Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry. Jean-Paul Sartre Poetry
Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty. Robert Green Ingersoll Poetry
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people. Maya Angelou Poetry
There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking. Jean de la Bruyere Poetry
The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight. Maya Angelou Poetry
We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist. Neil deGrasse Tyson Poetry
One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. Voltaire Poetry
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English. Victor Hugo Poetry
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. T. S. Eliot Poetry
The drama is complete poetry. The ode and the epic contain it only in germ; it contains both of them in a state of high development, and epitomizes both. Victor Hugo Poetry
There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with. P. J. O'Rourke Poetry
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. Tom Stoppard Poetry
Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish. William Blake Poetry
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. Socrates Poetry
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. Percy Bysshe Shelley Poetry
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Robert Frost Poetry
In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike. Maya Angelou Poetry