quotations about poetry
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order
No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry
None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
Some people pretend they never were in love and never wrote poetry; two weaknesses which they dare not own -- one of the heart, the other of the mind.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
The poet's is the highest type of character: other men dwell in the conventional--he chiefly abides in the universal.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
True poetry is not of earth,
'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"Parnassus", Cloudrifts at Twilight
For verses and poems I can turn to true food.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Here! is this you on the top of Fan-ko Mountain,
Wearing a huge hat in the noon-day sun?
How thin, how wretchedly thin, you have grown!
You must have been suffering from poetry again.
LI BAI
"Addressed Humorously to Tu Fu"
I think that believing in language -- in the ability of words to bring even an imagined reality into being -- is a big part of what it means to write poetry. If something like an idea or a belief is capable of being imagined or even described, then the possibility that it will be acted upon becomes much more likely. I think that many of my poems are attempts to take myself up on that premise, to step into conversation with voices and events that require me to decide something: what do I believe is right? What is the more subtle or subjective view of this situation? What must I challenge myself to understand?
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Ploughshares Literary Magazine, May 30, 2012
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more businesslike than businessmen.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
ROBERT FROST
"New Hampshire"
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
PLATO
Ion
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Heinrich Heine", Essays in Criticism, First Series
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Poetry"
When an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III", L'art romantique
When people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Guardian, November 14, 2008
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
If you can't be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?
BERNARD BECKETT
Lullaby