quotations about poetry
Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon -- even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Ploughshares Literary Magazine, May 30, 2012
A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.
CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
Levels
My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.
UMBERTO ECO
On Literature
On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
PABLO NERUDA
The Essential Neruda
I know it must be incredibly important, this politics malarkey. It's the silver hand that sends the world spinning round on its axis: it doesn't take a degree from Cambridge to decipher that one out. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel very passionately that, deep down (dare I confess?) I simply care more about poetry.
JADE CUTTLE
"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016
A poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
There is a sort of masonry in poetry, wherein the pause represents the joints of building; which ought in every line and course to have their dispositions varied.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
Poetry ... wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
Poetry is the utterance of truth--deep, heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Poets must, it seems to me, learn how to use a great many words before they can know how to use a few skilfully. Journalistic verbiage is not fluency.
MARSDEN HARTLEY
"The Business of Poetry"
Getting my poems published was a great achievement, but it didn't pay the rent. The only time I made any money was when I won a CAPS fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts in 1983. They gathered sixteen poets in a room and handed us each a check for $5,000. The room was filled with happiness so thick you could cut it. Eventually, I started looking around for another way to make a living.
ELIZABETH ZELVIN
"Interview Questions and Answers", official website
Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Gulf Coast, vol. 17, number 1
You're a true poet: but, my dear,
If you would hold the public ear,
Remember to be not too clear.
Be strange, be verbally intense;
Words matter ten times more than sense;
In clear streams, under sunny skies,
The fish you angle for won't rise;
In turbid water, cloudy weather,
They'll rush to you by shoals together.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
"Advice to a Young Poet"
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The New York Times, May 12, 1985
It's a perverse thing to be, or become, a poet, and always has been, given how starkly marginal a concern, relative to the larger culture, poetry is. Yet because of this, the stakes are incredibly high. There's no money in it, no fame, little chance of "relevancy." But there is glory.
COLIN BARRETT
"This Week in Fiction: Colin Barrett on Anhedonia and Writing Poetry", The New Yorker, April 11, 2016
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
Hark, his hands the lyre explore!
Bright-eyed Fancy, hov'ring o'er,
Scatters from her pictur'd urn
Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
THOMAS GRAY
The Poems
It is not in the power of every man or woman to be a poet, but all can cultivate a taste for it; and doing so tends to instruct the mind in what is refined and beautiful, heroic and elevating. Who could read "Paradise Lost" by that king of poets, Milton, without taking, for the time being at any rate, a flight towards heaven. Who could follow Camoens in his "Lusiad" without in imagination sailing through lovely isles covered with tropical foliage, and wafting spicy breezes through the fragrant air. Who that has read the unfortunate Fawkner's "Shipwreck," but has realized all the horrors of a water grave. Has Byron never led you to Greece, or Burns to the Ayrshire cotter's home? Have not the all-but inspired poems of that gifted Christian (all-but earthly saint), Heber, carried you as a missionary to "Afric's sunny fountains," or to the "Manger of Bethlehem?" Did Walter Scott never turn you for the time into a noble Scottish chieftain, or Longfellow into a North American Indian? Go to the poets when your mind is weary of the world, and there you will find rest.
T. AUGUSTUS FORBES LEITH
"On Cultivating a Taste for Poetry", Short Essays
The hard part for me is to find the poem--a poem that matters. To find what the poem knows that's special. I may think of writing about the same thing that everyone does, but I really like to write a poem that hasn't been written. And I don't mean its shape. I want to experience or discover ways of feeling that are fresh. I love it when I have perceived something fresh about being human and being happy.
JACK GILBERT
The Paris Review, fall/winter 2005