POETRY QUOTES X

quotations about poetry

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

Tags: Nicholson Baker


Poetry is pretty much everywhere: bubbling in the broken coffee machine, creeping through the cold-calls, boasting in the empty bank balance. Poetry is disconcerting and at best dangerous, lurking in that deep-stomach lurch when you lean too close to the platform edge.

JADE CUTTLE

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


There's no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one's pocket would serve as well as any university.

CHARLES SIMIC

The Paris Review, spring 2005

Tags: Charles Simic


Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!

ELIZABETH BISHOP

One Art: Letters

Tags: Elizabeth Bishop


A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.

JOHN DRYDEN

Fables, Ancient and Modern

Tags: John Dryden


Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.

JAMES JOYCE

a lecture on James Clarence Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin, February 1, 1902

Tags: James Joyce


For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

Tarr

Tags: Wyndham Lewis


Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

T. S. ELIOT

The Sacred Wood

Tags: T. S. Eliot


Debate doesn't really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope.... That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

SEAMUS HEANEY

Paris Review, Fall 1997

Tags: Seamus Heaney


Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

Tags: Mary Oliver


Writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

CESARE PAVESE

This Business of Living, November 6, 1937


If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

Tags: Aristotle


It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

T. S. ELIOT

Tradition and the Individual Talent

Tags: T. S. Eliot


The poet is the man that sings,
That plays upon the harp's wild strings,
That reads the tale of starry skies,
That soars aloft on seraph's wings.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD

"Poetry"

Tags: Benjamin Franklin Field


No one ever expects poetry to sell.

ALAN LIGHTMAN

interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000

Tags: Alan Lightman


Poetry as religion -- I'll drink to that! For me it is a sacred vocation, and one that no one can take away from me. One is a witch in community, one has a job title conferred by an employer: but one can be a poet without approval or sanction from anyone else. Even a child writing their first poems may call themselves a poet. I love that.

YVONNE ABURROW

"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016


Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Pericles and Aspasia

Tags: Walter Savage Landor


Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

LOUIS ARAGON

Treatise on Style

Tags: Louis Aragon


Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

JACK LONDON

Martin Eden

Tags: Jack London