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

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

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
Seamus Heaney

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
Seamus Heaney

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
Seamus Heaney

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.
Seamus Heaney

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.
George Will

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov

Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.
Ani DiFranco

Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.
Herbert Spencer

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.
Ezra Pound

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.
Ezra Pound

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Paul Engle

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.
Gaston Bachelard

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.
Gaston Bachelard