quotations about poetry
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
A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.
APHRA BEHN
Oroonoko
A small poet repeats himself like a clock.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
He that would earn the Poet's sacred name,
Must write for future as for present ages.
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH
"The Poet"
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"
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you--like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist--or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, August 3, 1940
Poetry is the other way of using language.
HOWARD NEMEROV
Reflexions on Poetry & Politics
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
New Year Letter
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
CHARLES SIMIC
Dime-Store Alchemy
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781
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.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Babies are not brought by storks, and poets are not produced by workshops.
JAMES FENTON
Ronald Duncan Lecture, 1992
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
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
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH
attributed, Unlocking the Poem
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theater and Its Double
A true poet comes among us only once in a generation, sometimes not once in a century, and ... certain civilized nations never produce a great poet. We suffer from dearth of poets, not from lack of love for poetry.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Deprive poetry of this which it has in common with philosophy--the seeing of things as they are--and the beauty and fragrance of the flower are gone.
JOHN GRIER HIBBEN
The Problems of Philosophy
Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008
Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook