"Poetry is the deification of reality." - Edith Sitwell

"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

"Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield." - Billy Collins

"Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful." - Rita Dove

"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"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

"A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman." - Wallace Stevens

"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." - Robert Frost

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." - Virginia Woolf

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession." Robert Graves

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him." - Dylan Thomas

"Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"There's a reason poets often say,'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"I'm a great believer in poetry out of the classroom, in public places, on subways, trains, on cocktail napkins. I'd rather have my poems on the subway than around the seminar table at an MFA program." - Billy Collins

"Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness." - Alice Walker

"Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers." - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know." - Adrienne Rich

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

"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth." - Jean Cocteau

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." - Robert Frost

"I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything." - Steven Wright

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason." - Novalis

"Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry." - George Braque

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry." - Muriel Rukeyser

"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

"Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." - Carl Sandburg

"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses." - Jean Cocteau

"Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." - Don Marquis

"The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world." - Derek Walcott

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

"Poetry is more a threshold than a path." - Seamus Heaney

"You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you." - Joseph Joubert

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history." - Plato

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." - William Wordsworth

"I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet." - Bob Dylan

"Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails 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

"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

"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

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint." - Oscar Wilde

"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood." - Pablo Neruda

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote." - Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Photo #1: Radu Florin on Unsplash
Photo #2: Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash