Poetry Quote by Emily Dickinson — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—”

“Success is counted sweetest”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

“A wounded dear leaps the highest”

“She died--this was the way she died;”

“Inebriate of Air — am I —”

“Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.”

“Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

“The wind is the moon's imagination wandering.”

“Now therefore, while the youthful hue”

“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”