Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Allen Ginsberg

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.
Allen Ginsberg

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
Allen Ginsberg

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
Hu Shih

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
E. M. Forster

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
Denis Diderot

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
Denis Diderot

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
William Hazlitt

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.
Naguib Mahfouz

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Henry Ellis

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Peter Abrahams

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Walter Scott

Poetry must be made by all and not by one.
Comte de Lautreamont

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
Joyce Carol Oates

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
Norman MacCaig

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.
Norman MacCaig