POETRY QUOTES VII

quotations about poetry


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Poetry is God's work.

KATY LEDERER
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"An Interview with Katy Lederer", Thermos Magazine, January 21, 2010


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Tags: Katy Lederer


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

Tags: John Berger


Certain events such as love, or a national calamity, or May, bring pressure to bear on the individual, and if the pressure is strong enough, something in the form of verse is bound to be squeezed out.

JOHN STEINBECK

The Paris Review, fall 1975

Tags: John Steinbeck


Joyous or bereaved, poetry is the ink and paper realm of emotion.

MAGGIE GRIMASON

"The Province of the Heart", Alibi, April 28, 2016


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

Tags: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel


Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

W. H. AUDEN

New Year Letter

Tags: W. H. Auden


A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.

APHRA BEHN

Oroonoko

Tags: Aphra Behn


A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

OSCAR WILDE

"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886

Tags: Oscar Wilde


You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

JOHN ADAMS

letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781

Tags: John Adams


Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

Tags: Mary Oliver


'Tis true among fields and woods I sing,
Aloof from cities--that my poor strains
Were born, like the simple flowers you bring,
In English meadows and English lanes.

ALFRED AUSTIN

prelude, Soliloquies in Song

Tags: Alfred Austin


Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, August 3, 1940

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


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

Tags: Charles William Day


Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.

UMBERTO ECO

The Paris Review, summer 2008

Tags: Umberto Eco


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


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

Tags: Antonin Artaud


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"

Tags: Jorge Luis Borges


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

JOHN DRYDEN

Fables, Ancient and Modern

Tags: John Dryden


Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.

FRANCIS BACON

The Advancement of Learning

Tags: Francis Bacon


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

Tags: Samuel R. Delany