POETRY QUOTES II
quotations about poetry
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The Marble Faun
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the fullness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations. 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, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Melancholy is ... the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"Love the Wild Swan"
A translation of a poem is like a plastercast of a statue.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. AUDEN
"Squares and Oblongs", Poets at Work
Where you find poems in most people's lives is at weddings and at funerals. Poems are turned to in the great transitions of a life, when we are at sea amid changes too vast to feel in any way the master of. One of the things poems do is demonstrate that you aren't alone -- that other humans have been here before, and have found a way to sustain aliveness, to find beauty within the condition of grief. And this allows you to go on.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"How can poems transform the world? A chat with poet Jane Hirshfield.", Washington Post, May 13, 2015
If you consider poetry in all its fire of human becoming, at the summit of an inspiration which delivers the new world to us, what can be the use of a biography which tells us the past, the heavy past of the poet?
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The New York Times, May 12, 1985
I can't bear these accounts I read in The Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art.
HAROLD BLOOM
Mantis, 2002
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
attributed, An Introduction to Poetry and Criticism
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Safety Pins and Other Essays
From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be--should be--a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
Because I fell in love with poetry, my mother sighed and said that I was doomed to work at a cosmetics factory, naming lipsticks.
GWEN HART
"The Empress of Kisses"
A poet hurts himself by writing prose; as a racehorse hurts his motion by condescending to draw a team.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.
ADAM PHILLIPS
The Paris Review, spring 2014
Poetry is another way of encouraging people to think and feel deeply about their own lives and their relationships to other people and other communities.
HANNAH ENSOR
"Poetry to fill the air at weekend festival", Tucson Sentinel, April 14, 2016
Poetry is Life's wild song.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD
"Poetry"
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order