POETRY QUOTES VI

quotations about poetry

Here! is this you on the top of Fan-ko Mountain,
Wearing a huge hat in the noon-day sun?
How thin, how wretchedly thin, you have grown!
You must have been suffering from poetry again.

LI BAI

"Addressed Humorously to Tu Fu"

Tags: Li Bai


Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.

FRANCIS BACON

The Advancement of Learning

Tags: Francis Bacon


Poetry is the other way of using language.

HOWARD NEMEROV

Reflexions on Poetry & Politics


The poem that says "I love you" is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of.

JAMES FENTON

BBC Radio, October 4, 1994

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Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.

UMBERTO ECO

The Paris Review, summer 2008

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Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

W. H. AUDEN

New Year Letter

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The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

T. S. ELIOT

Tradition and the Individual Talent

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Poetry is prose in slow motion.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

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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

I, Lucifer

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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

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Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, August 3, 1940

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One of the current great problems in the world is fundamentalism of every kind -- political, spiritual -- and poetry is an antidote to fundamentalism. Poetry is about the clarities that you find when you don't simplify. Poetry is about complexity, nuance, subtlety. Poems also create larger fields of possibility. The imagination is limitless, so even when a person is confronted with an unchangeable outer circumstance, one thing poems give you is the sense that there's always, still, a changeability, a malleability, of inner circumstance. That's the beginning of freedom.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

"How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015


Is poetry more important than politics? In a practical sense, probably not, but people have different perspectives and will place their values accordingly. I know I couldn't munch through metaphors if I was half-starved and shivering on the streets - though I'd probably give it a go. Still, as someone pointed out, a brew does taste better with a spoonful of sugar and a splash of semi-skimmed than with a dash of Dylan Thomas.

JADE CUTTLE

"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016


A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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A true poet comes among us only once in a generation, sometimes not once in a century, and ... certain civilized nations never produce a great poet. We suffer from dearth of poets, not from lack of love for poetry.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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A poet does not work by square or line.

WILLIAM COWPER

Conversation

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A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


He that would earn the Poet's sacred name,
Must write for future as for present ages.

CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH

"The Poet"


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

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A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

OSCAR WILDE

"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886

Tags: Oscar Wilde