If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
Emily Dickinson

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

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.
T. S. Eliot

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot

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

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot

Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!
Lord Byron

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
Lord Byron

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

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
John Muir

Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
Horace Walpole

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
Horace Walpole

Superstition is the poetry of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Science arose from poetry... when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Personality is everything in art and poetry.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Plutarch

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats