POETRY QUOTES VI

quotations about poetry

A poet does not work by square or line.

WILLIAM COWPER

Conversation

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The poet's is the highest type of character: other men dwell in the conventional--he chiefly abides in the universal.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

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Poets suffer occasional delusions of angelhood and find themselves condemned to express it in the bric-a-brac tongues of the human world. Lots of them go mad.

GLEN DUNCAN

I, Lucifer

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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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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

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Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

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The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON

The Field of Philosophy

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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

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

MAGGIE GRIMASON

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


A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

London Independent, February 18, 1989

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A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

OSCAR WILDE

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

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Poetry is the other way of using language.

HOWARD NEMEROV

Reflexions on Poetry & Politics


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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Poetry is God's work.

KATY LEDERER

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

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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


It might sound a little glib, but maybe I don't know what a finished poem is. I lean toward the school that a poem is never finished, it's just abandoned.

WALTER BARGEN

"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"

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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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A small poet repeats himself like a clock.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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'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

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Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

letter to Ellen O'Leary, February 3, 1889

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