Quotes About Poetry for Random Acts of Poetry Day

Who doesn’t want to drop verse everywhere they go?

If you’ve ever felt the urge to show off your knowledge of verse, today would be the perfect day to do it. That’s because the first Wednesday of October is Random Acts of Poetry Day, when people are encouraged to leave a poem somewhere — whether it be scribbled on paper and left on a park bench or etched in chalk on the sidewalk. These quotes are about poetry to inspire some random acts.

1. “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” -Salman Rushdie

2. “Poetry is play. I’d even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.” -Robert Frost

3. “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.” -Gustave Flaubert

4. “An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.” -Raymond Chandler

5. “Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.” -Yevgeny Yevtushenko

6. “Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful, you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.” -Mahmoud Darwish

7. “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” -Paul Valery 8. “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” -William Butler Yeats

9. “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” -W.H. Auden

10. “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” -Robert Frost

11. “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” -June Jordan

12. “Poetry comes from the highest happiness or the deepest sorrow.” -A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

13. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” -Audre Lorde

14. “‘Therefore’ is a word the poet must not know.” -Andre Gide

15. “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.” -Rita Dove

16. “To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” -Robert Graves

17. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” -Percy Bysshe Shelley

18. “I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” -Edgar Allan Poe

19. “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” -Novalis

20. “Poetry is life distilled.” -Gwendolyn Brooks

21. “Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.” -Alice Walker

22. “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

23. “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.” -Soren Kierkegaard

24. “Poetry…is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal, which the reader recognizes as his own.” -Salvatore Quasimodo

25. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” -Emily Dickinson

26. “Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting.” -Simonides

27. “Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it begins as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.” -Mary Oliver

28. “Poetry, she thought, wasn’t written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.” -Nicholas Sparks

29. “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.” -Steven Wright

30. “A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer….He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.” -E.B. White

31. “Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.” -Jack Kerouac

32. “Prose is a museum where all the old weapons of poetry are kept.” T.E. Hulme

33. “Everything you invent is true: You can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” -Julian Barnes

34. “Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.” -Dylan Thomas

35. “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

36. “The poet is the priest of the invisible.” -Wallace Stevens

37. “Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.” -Lawrence Ferlinghetti

38. “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning 5 or 6 times.” -Randall Jarrell

39. “Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” -Sylvia Plath

40. “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” -Carl Sandburg

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

42. “A poet can survive everything, but a misprint.” -Oscar Wilde

43. “The poetry of the earth is never dead.” -John Keats

44. “Poetry is talking on tiptoe.” -George Meredith

45. “Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.” -Adrienne Rich

46. “You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.” -Carol Ann Duffy

47. “Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.” -Samuel Beckett

48. “Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere.” -Henry David Thoreau

49. “Poetry is a religion with no hope.” -Jean Cocteau

50. “What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry — but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.” -G.K. Chesterton

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Sources:

30 Quotes About Poetry. Book Riot. https://bookriot.com/30-quotes-about-poetry/

45 Quotes about Poetry for National Poetry Day. Interesting Literature. https://interestingliterature.com/2015/10/45-quotes-about-poetry-for-national-poetry-day/

90 Poetry Quotes Perfect For Contemplating the Power of Words. Everyday Power. https://everydaypower.com/poetry-quotes/

Poetry Quotes. BrainyQuote. https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/poetry-quotes

Poetry Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/poetry

RANDOM ACTS OF POETRY DAY. National Day Calendar. https://nationaldaycalendar.com/random-acts-of-poetry-day-first-wednesday-of-october/

Schneider, C. (2015, April 2). 17 Poets’ Quotes About Poetry. Mental Floss. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62623/17-poets-quotes-about-poetry