Here's some poetry quotes for you guys....

• The poetry is the Earth, charming; The river, flowing from lofty mountains; Nature, a young woman and a heavenly plant with blossoming flowers, slinking in the garden of the mind.
  • Manmohan Acharya, in Gita Milindam [Song of the Bumblebee] (2008).

• You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
  • John Adams, letter to John Quincy Adams (14 May 1781).

• To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
  • Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society (1949).

• The crown of literature is poetry.
  • Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (1888) "Count Leo Tolstoi".

• Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
  • Aristotle, Poetics (335) 1451b 6.

• Poetry is itself a thing of God;
  He made his prophets poets; and the more
  We feel of poesie do we become
  Like God in love and power,—under-makers.
  • Philip James Bailey, Festus (1813), Proem, line 5.

• All poetry is misrepresentation.
  • Jeremy Bentham, An Aphorism attributed to him according to John Stuart Mill (see Mill's essay On Bentham and Coleridge in Utilitarianism edt. by Mary Warnock p. 123).

• As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really."
  • Charles Bernstein, "Against National Poetry Month As Such", from My Way: Speeches and Poems, 1999, University Of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226044092.

• You speak
  As one who fed on poetry.
  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu (1839), Act I, scene 1.

• Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.
  • Edmund Burke, Memoir of the life and character of Edmund Burke by James Prior

• Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash;
  Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu' cash;
  Some rhyme to court the countra clash,
  An' raise a din;
  For me, an aim I never fash;
  I rhyme for fun.
  • Robert Burns, Epistle to James Smith (1786).

• For rhyme the rudder is of verses,
  With which, like ships, they steer their courses.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part I (1663-64), Canto I, line 463.

• Some force whole regions, in despite
  O' geography, to change their site;
  Make former times shake hands with latter,
  And that which was before come after;
  But those that write in rhyme still make
  The one verse for the other's sake;
  For one for sense, and one for rhyme,
  I think's sufficient at one time.
  • Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II (1664), Canto I, line 23.

• Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme,
  Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto I (1812), Stanza 3.

• I by no means rank poetry high in the scale of intelligence—this may look like affectation—but it is my real opinion—it is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake
  • Lord Byron, letter to Annabella Milbanke (29 November 1813).

• Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
  • James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919).

• Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.
  • John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, "Lecture on Nothing" (1959).

• Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship (1840), 3.

• For there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, in London and Westminster Review (1838).

• Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver.
  • A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
    • René Char, as quoted in The French-American Review (1976) by Texas Christian University, p. 132.

• I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.
  • Lucille Clifton, rebroadcast after her death on Bill Moyers Journal, 26 February 2010 (transcript, video).

• …poetry = the best words in their best order.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (12 July 1827).

• An undevout poet is an impossibility.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton.

• No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817) ch. XV