Real Words

April is National Poetry Month so I thought I’d share ten great quotations about poetry as a way to celebrate:

1. “Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” - Audre Lorde
2. “Real poetry, the thick, dense, intense, complicated stuff that lives and endures, requires blood sweat; blood and sweat are essential elements in poetry as well as behind it.” - Edward Abbey
3. “Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you — like music to the musician… — or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their nots and explanations.” - Fitzgerald
4. “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” - Sandburg
5. “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” - Aristotle
6. “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” - Shelley
7. “Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that.” - Mary Oliver
8. “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” - Frost
9. “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” - Don Marquis
10. “Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry.” - Baudelaire

What is your favorite quote about poetry?