Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
John Keats

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats

Why should poetry have to make sense?
Charlie Chaplin

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent Van Gogh

The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn't mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.
Johnny Depp

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.
Niels Bohr

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

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H. L. Mencken

Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.
Bette Midler

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

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
Victor Hugo

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
Gertrude Stein

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
Edmund Burke

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne