quotations about poetry
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH
attributed, Unlocking the Poem
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
The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conjunctions, Fall 1991
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
Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
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
There is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith.
JOHN C. BAILEY
The Claims of French Poetry
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!
JOHN DRYDEN
To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killegrew
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781
I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.
MAYA ANGELOU
Facebook post, October 4, 2012
Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
Joyous or bereaved, poetry is the ink and paper realm of emotion.
MAGGIE GRIMASON
"The Province of the Heart", Alibi, April 28, 2016
A poet does not work by square or line.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversation
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
CHARLES SIMIC
Dime-Store Alchemy
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
The poet's is the highest type of character: other men dwell in the conventional--he chiefly abides in the universal.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
Poetry is the other way of using language.
HOWARD NEMEROV
Reflexions on Poetry & Politics
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