POETRY QUOTES V

quotations about poetry

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

Tags: Alfred Austin


Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

PLATO

Ion

Tags: Plato


I string sounds together. But to string them I have to remember a bunch of old ones I heard somewhere and then juggle them into a new rhythm and shape.

FRANK LOESSER

letter to Angel Steinbeck, A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life

Tags: Frank Loesser


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


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


A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.

JOHN KEATS

letter to Benjamin Bailey, October 8, 1817

Tags: John Keats


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

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


There is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith.

JOHN C. BAILEY

The Claims of French Poetry

Tags: John C. Bailey


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"

Tags: Jorge Luis Borges


Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.

JAMES FENTON

Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992

Tags: James Fenton


The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

The Field of Philosophy

Tags: Joseph Alexander Leighton


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

Tags: Tracy K. Smith


Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


Joyous or bereaved, poetry is the ink and paper realm of emotion.

MAGGIE GRIMASON

"The Province of the Heart", Alibi, April 28, 2016


But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"The Poetic Principle"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe


O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!

JOHN DRYDEN

To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew

Tags: John Dryden


I don't think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. "I can't say it that way, what way can I find that will do?"

T. S. ELIOT

The Paris Review, spring-summer 1959

Tags: T. S. Eliot


I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


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

Tags: Bernard Beckett