quotations about poetry
I approach poetry and spirituality like literary nitroglycerin -- a little can do a lot and you better damn well be careful with it.
CRAIG JOHNSON
"A Conversation with Craig Johnson", The Cold Dish
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order
No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more businesslike than businessmen.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
ROBERT FROST
"New Hampshire"
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.
MARGARET ATWOOD
On Writing Poetry
When an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III", L'art romantique
Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
Poetry is art, but poetry contests are sport, bound by rules as exacting as any that govern collegiate competition.
ZUSHA ELINSON
"Poetry Is Art, but Poetry Slams Are Sport, Bound by Pages of Rules", Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2016
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
"Heinrich Heine", Essays in Criticism, First Series
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
Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
JOHN BERGER
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Some people pretend they never were in love and never wrote poetry; two weaknesses which they dare not own -- one of the heart, the other of the mind.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Affections", Les Caractères
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013
I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.
T. S. ELIOT
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1959
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
JOHN KEATS
letter to Benjamin Bailey, October 8, 1817
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
London Independent, February 18, 1989
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
The permanent passions of mankind--love, religion, patriotism, humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will and fate; the rise and fall of empires--these are all great themes, and, if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus