POETRY QUOTES IV

quotations about poetry

It tells us a great deal about a man to know that he chooses as his form of expression the poetic medium. It tells us, I think, something about his system of ontology. The composition of poetry is evidence that for him values have a reality, and he is capable of emotion upon the subject of value. The entire corpus of the world's poetry rests upon a theory of universal analogy which teaches that all phenomena in some degree resemble each other. There is a minimal truth in even the wildest metaphor simply because the world is, from one point of view, a unitary thing.

RICHARD WEAVER

"Agrarianism in Exile"


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


Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

EDWARD HIRSCH

interview, 2007

Tags: Edward Hirsch


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

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


You speak
As one who fed on poetry.

EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON

Richelieu

Tags: Edward Bulwer Lytton


A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately.

MARGARET ATWOOD

On Writing Poetry

Tags: Margaret Atwood


For verses and poems I can turn to true food.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

Tags: St. Augustine


Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.

MATTHEW ARNOLD

"Heinrich Heine", Essays in Criticism, First Series

Tags: Matthew Arnold


Poetry is art, but poetry contests are sport, bound by rules as exacting as any that govern collegiate competition.

ZUSHA ELINSON

"Poetry Is Art, but Poetry Slams Are Sport, Bound by Pages of Rules", Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2016


Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.

GASTON BACHELARD

The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos

Tags: Gaston Bachelard


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

Tags: Salman Rushdie


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

Tags: Jean de La Bruyere


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

Tags: John Berger


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

EDWARD HIRSCH

interview, 2007

Tags: Edward Hirsch


A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.

JOHN KEATS

letter to Benjamin Bailey, October 8, 1817

Tags: John Keats


My poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

PABLO NERUDA

Memoirs

Tags: Pablo Neruda


I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

T. S. ELIOT

The Paris Review, spring-summer 1959

Tags: T. S. Eliot


When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


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

Tags: Alfred Austin


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

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee