POETRY QUOTES V

quotations about poetry

The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Conjunctions, Fall 1991

Tags: Chinua Achebe


There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

EDWARD HIRSCH

interview, 2007

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Poetry is prose in slow motion.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

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I think that believing in language -- in the ability of words to bring even an imagined reality into being -- is a big part of what it means to write poetry. If something like an idea or a belief is capable of being imagined or even described, then the possibility that it will be acted upon becomes much more likely. I think that many of my poems are attempts to take myself up on that premise, to step into conversation with voices and events that require me to decide something: what do I believe is right? What is the more subtle or subjective view of this situation? What must I challenge myself to understand?

TRACY K. SMITH

interview, Ploughshares Literary Magazine, May 30, 2012

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Moving through decades of carefully selected writing changes us; it reminds us that poetry is a form of activism and that language can shift our experience and understanding of the world, can do something beyond the page.

ERICA KAUFMAN

"The End of Gender", Boston Review, May 4, 2016


The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

T. S. ELIOT

Tradition and the Individual Talent

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I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down.... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.

STELLA BENSON

This Is the End

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There is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith.

JOHN C. BAILEY

The Claims of French Poetry

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If you can't be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?

BERNARD BECKETT

Lullaby

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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

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Away! away! I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy.

JOHN KEATS

"Ode to a Nightingale"

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Poetry is God's work.

KATY LEDERER

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

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Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

CHARLES SIMIC

The Unemployed Fortune-Teller

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I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997

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Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

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Poetry is never a sensible choice on financial grounds. Burglary beats poetry, when it comes to making money.

GARRISON KEILLOR

"Does love have to be a five-alarm fire?", Salon, July 15, 1998

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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

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A poet does not work by square or line.

WILLIAM COWPER

Conversation

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The poem that says "I love you" is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of.

JAMES FENTON

BBC Radio, October 4, 1994

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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

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