POETRY QUOTES VIII

quotations about poetry

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read -- in such a moment, anything can happen.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

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In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.

J.M. COETZEE

Disgrace

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Poetry is the music of the soul, and above all, of great and feeling souls.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

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Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.

AMY LOWELL

preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry

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Poets' food is love and fame.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

"An Exhortation"

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Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

"The Divine Comedy"

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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

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Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Introduction to Aesthetics

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Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

We

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Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

TRACY K. SMITH

interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1

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Poetry has the power to turn words into darts that shoot under your skin.

PENNY ASHTON

"Poetry Idol's organiser is shocked and saddened to learn that slam poetry is 'dumb-ass and not good'", The Spinoff, April 28, 2016


If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

JOHN KEATS

letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818

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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

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All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

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I despise slam poetry. Not as much as I despise ukulele orchestras, but it's up there. You can make all the connections you like to the spoken word performance poetry of the Beats and hippies of the 1950s and '60s (Allen Ginsberg performing Howl in 1959), Harlem roasts of the '20s and '30s, and Flyting (the bardic insult competitions the Anglo-Nordic peoples filled in the long winters with between the fifth and sixteenth centuries) and good luck to you, but I hate it.

ANDREW PAUL WOOD

"Slam poetry is despicable and dumb-ass and not good", The Spinoff, April 27, 2016


I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

The Paris Review, fall 1981

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All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Louis Lambert

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Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent--creating superhuman excellences--that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust.

CHARLES WILLIAM DAY

The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos

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Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double

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A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

The Fall of the Towers

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