POETRY QUOTES II
quotations about poetry
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. AUDEN
"Squares and Oblongs", Poets at Work
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"
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 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"
Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
attributed, An Introduction to Poetry and Criticism
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
A translation of a poem is like a plastercast of a statue.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
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
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
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
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"
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
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Safety Pins and Other Essays
None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
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
I think that's the guts of what poetry is about -- feeling, whether it's something nostalgic, or something fearful, or anxiety-producing, or mourning a loss, many different things. It's the feeling of it.
LUKE ANDERSON
"A place for poetry", Echo Press, May 4, 2016