Top 10 Reading Poetry Quotes

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

Khalil Gibran

Pain, Reading Poetry, Joy

Khalil Gibran “The New Frontier and Sand and Foam”, Library of Alexandria

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

James Tate

Editing, Reading Poetry, Needs

James Tate (1999). “The route as briefed”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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

Ideas, Reading Poetry, Skins

New York Times, February 17, 1957.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

Emily Dickinson

Book, Fire, Reading Poetry

Quoted in Martha Bianchi, Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924)

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

T. S. Eliot

Art, Writing, Reading Poetry

The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

William Shakespeare

Love, Reading Poetry, Mind

Sonnet 116

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Rita Dove

Powerful, Reading Poetry, Language

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

John Fowles

Writing, Reading Poetry, Poetry

1969 The French Lieutenant's Woman, ch.19.

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

Inspirational, Reading Poetry, Remembrance

Letter to John Taylor, 27 February 1818, in H. E. Rollins (ed.) 'The Letters of John Keats' (1958) vol. 1, p. 238