POETRY QUOTES VI

quotations about poetry

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

JOHN ADAMS

letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781

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No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

ALFRED AUSTIN

The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

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Poetry is prose in slow motion.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

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Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

ROBERTO BOLAÑO

2666

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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

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We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

JORGE LUIS BORGES

"Poetry"

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All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon

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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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I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.

ANNE CARSON

The Paris Review, fall 2004

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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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I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

MAYA ANGELOU

Facebook post, October 4, 2012

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Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

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Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

CHARLES DICKENS

The Pickwick Papers

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

EDWARD HIRSCH

interview, 2007

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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

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Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

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Is poetry more important than politics? In a practical sense, probably not, but people have different perspectives and will place their values accordingly. I know I couldn't munch through metaphors if I was half-starved and shivering on the streets - though I'd probably give it a go. Still, as someone pointed out, a brew does taste better with a spoonful of sugar and a splash of semi-skimmed than with a dash of Dylan Thomas.

JADE CUTTLE

"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016


Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty; whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term, as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

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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"

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