quotations about poetry
Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.
GLEN DUNCAN
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I, Lucifer
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
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
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!
JOHN DRYDEN
To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew
A poet hurts himself by writing prose; as a racehorse hurts his motion by condescending to draw a team.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.
ANNE CARSON
The Paris Review, fall 2004
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 is never a sensible choice on financial grounds. Burglary beats poetry, when it comes to making money.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Does love have to be a five-alarm fire?", Salon, July 15, 1998
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 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"
A poet does not work by square or line.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversation
I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down.... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
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
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, May 28, 1788
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
Deprive poetry of this which it has in common with philosophy--the seeing of things as they are--and the beauty and fragrance of the flower are gone.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
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
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
He that would earn the Poet's sacred name,
Must write for future as for present ages.
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH
"The Poet"