Famous Quotes

"There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army."

John Ashbery on Poetry

More quotes about Poetry

• "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "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 on Poetry

• "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

• "A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

More quotes by John Ashbery

• "I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length."

• "The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be."