30 Inspiring Quotes about Poets and Poetry

Seeking answers on the role and purpose of poets and poetry in our lives? Delve into the following quotes about poets and poetry for insights.

1. “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” —Carl Sandburg
2. “Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.” —Mahmoud Darwish
3. “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat” —Robert Frost
4. “All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ‘Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better’”—Sonia Sanchez
5. “A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.” ―H. L. Mencken
6. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”— Percy Bysshe Shelley
7. “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” —Plato
8. “A poet’s work … to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.” —Salman Rushdie
9. “The poet is the priest of the invisible.” — Wallace Stevens
10. “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
11. “My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.” —John Lennon
12. “A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.” —James Dickey
13. “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.” —Abraham Maslow
14. ““All a poet can do today is warn.” —Wilfred Owen
15. “I’m a political poet – let us say a ‘human’ poet, a poet that’s concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that’s what I’m going to use.” —Juan Felipe Herrera
16. “Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.” —Alice Walker
17. “If a poet does not tell the truth about time, his or her work will not survive it. Past or present, there is a human dimension to time, human voices within it, and human griefs ordained by it.” — Eavan Boland
18. “Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.” —Amanda Gorman
19. “For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.” —Oscar Wilde
20. “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.” —Charles Baudelaire
21. “Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.” — Amanda Gorman
22. “Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.” —Terrance Hayes
23. “There is nothing settled about a poet’s identity. The becoming doesn’t stop because the being has been achieved. They proceed together, attached in ways that are hard to be exact about.” —Eavan Boland
24. “Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.” —T. S. Eliot
25. “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
26. “Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.” —Helen Hayes
27. “If everybody became a poet the world would be much better. We would all read to each other.” —Nikki Giovanni
28. “Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.” — Ada Limon
29. “Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.”
    — Stephen Spender
30. “All cultures and peoples turn to poetry during times of celebration, transformation, and challenge—those times when ordinary language cannot carry meaning beyond our understanding.” — Joy Harjo