quotations about poetry
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
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
New Year Letter
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
There is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith.
JOHN C. BAILEY
The Claims of French Poetry
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
Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.
CHARLES SIMIC
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH
attributed, Unlocking the Poem
Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.
JAMES FENTON
Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992
Poetry is Life's wild song.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD
"Poetry"
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"
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
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
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
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.
T. S. ELIOT
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1959
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
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!
JOHN DRYDEN
To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew
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
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"
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
Poetry is the other way of using language.
HOWARD NEMEROV
Reflexions on Poetry & Politics