10 Great Quotes About Poets and Poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Only poetry inspires poetry.”

“Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.”

“Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale ’til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.”

“Every word was once a poem.”

“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.”

“Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.”

“Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.”

“For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”

“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.”

“The true poem is the poet’s mind.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson