POETRY QUOTES IV

quotations about poetry

For verses and poems I can turn to true food.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

Tags: St. Augustine


A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

London Independent, February 18, 1989

Tags: Salman Rushdie


A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

MARGARET ATWOOD

On Writing Poetry

Tags: Margaret Atwood


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

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


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

Tags: Matthew Arnold


Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: Gaston Bachelard


Moving through decades of carefully selected writing changes us; it reminds us that poetry is a form of activism and that language can shift our experience and understanding of the world, can do something beyond the page.

ERICA KAUFMAN

"The End of Gender", Boston Review, May 4, 2016


There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

EDWARD HIRSCH

interview, 2007

Tags: Edward Hirsch


The permanent passions of mankind--love, religion, patriotism, humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will and fate; the rise and fall of empires--these are all great themes, and, if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind.

ALFRED AUSTIN

The Bridling of Pegasus

Tags: Alfred Austin


Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyze and purify it.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

Tags: Eliza Cook


Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

2666

Tags: Roberto Bolaño


Poetry is art, but poetry contests are sport, bound by rules as exacting as any that govern collegiate competition.

ZUSHA ELINSON

"Poetry Is Art, but Poetry Slams Are Sport, Bound by Pages of Rules", Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2016


Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.

JOHN BERGER

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

Tags: John Berger


Poetry (by extension, any art) is a response, it is part of a conversation between the writer and the larger world--and just writing that I realize how much our writing is a form of listening. And we have a response-ability that can grow, shift, change as we do over the years.

SARAH SADIE

"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016


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"

Tags: Robert Frost


My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

PABLO NERUDA

Memoirs

Tags: Pablo Neruda


It tells us a great deal about a man to know that he chooses as his form of expression the poetic medium. It tells us, I think, something about his system of ontology. The composition of poetry is evidence that for him values have a reality, and he is capable of emotion upon the subject of value. The entire corpus of the world's poetry rests upon a theory of universal analogy which teaches that all phenomena in some degree resemble each other. There is a minimal truth in even the wildest metaphor simply because the world is, from one point of view, a unitary thing.

RICHARD WEAVER

"Agrarianism in Exile"


Certain events such as love, or a national calamity, or May, bring pressure to bear on the individual, and if the pressure is strong enough, something in the form of verse is bound to be squeezed out.

JOHN STEINBECK

The Paris Review, fall 1975

Tags: John Steinbeck


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

Tags: Edward Hirsch


Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley