quotations about poetry
We do not reject the song that makes the blood dance faster through our veins, or the lyric that thrills us with its sensuous beauty, or the romantic tale that fills up some painful or languorous hour, or the ode that sometimes, lapping our spirits in forgetfulness or summer dreams, brings us welcome reprieve from life's "sore spell of toil." But our unstinted and undying gratitude we reserve for the poet who, finding us disconsolate, comforts us; who, finding us disheartened and ready to yield, sounds the note of advance for us; who, finding us recreant to our trust and disloyal to our aspirations, uncovers for us once more the ideal that has been temporarily obscured. It is he who stays our feet amid the whirling waters of temptation; who sets the stars of faith and love and hope in our benighted sky, and who whispers to us in our lonely and nerveless moments of despair the heartening message of God and immortality.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
T. S. ELIOT
The Music of Poetry
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T. S. ELIOT
The Sacred Wood
A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Fall of the Towers
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
Poetry is pretty much everywhere: bubbling in the broken coffee machine, creeping through the cold-calls, boasting in the empty bank balance. Poetry is disconcerting and at best dangerous, lurking in that deep-stomach lurch when you lean too close to the platform edge.
JADE CUTTLE
"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016
The poet is the man that sings,
That plays upon the harp's wild strings,
That reads the tale of starry skies,
That soars aloft on seraph's wings.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD
"Poetry"
Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
"The Town"
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. ELIOT
"Dante"
Poetry has the power to turn words into darts that shoot under your skin.
PENNY ASHTON
"Poetry Idol's organiser is shocked and saddened to learn that slam poetry is 'dumb-ass and not good'", The Spinoff, April 28, 2016
If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
I despise slam poetry. Not as much as I despise ukulele orchestras, but it's up there. You can make all the connections you like to the spoken word performance poetry of the Beats and hippies of the 1950s and '60s (Allen Ginsberg performing Howl in 1959), Harlem roasts of the '20s and '30s, and Flyting (the bardic insult competitions the Anglo-Nordic peoples filled in the long winters with between the fifth and sixteenth centuries) and good luck to you, but I hate it.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD
"Slam poetry is despicable and dumb-ass and not good", The Spinoff, April 27, 2016
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose ; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Pericles and Aspasia
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. SALINGER
"Teddy"