quotations about poetry
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. SALINGER
"Teddy"
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
"The Town"
Out on the foolish phrase, but there's a hard rhyming without it.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 26, 1845
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
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Philosophy of Style
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Pericles and Aspasia
Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
No one ever expects poetry to sell.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us -- and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, February 3, 1818
Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS
The Pickwick Papers
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
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and 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 is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Albotross"