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

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
Leonard Cohen

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
Arnold Palmer

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

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.
Stephen Colbert

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
W. H. Auden

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
W. H. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden

It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
John Ruskin

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
John Ruskin

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
John Ruskin

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Bertrand Russell

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
James Joyce

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Charles Baudelaire

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire

Wine is bottled poetry.
Robert Louis Stevenson