quotations about poetry
Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Pericles and Aspasia
Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
Though my verse but roam the air
And murmur in the trees,
You may discern a purpose there,
As in music of the bees.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Birthday", Lyrical Poems
I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
letter to Melchor Fernandez Almagro, February 1926
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
J. D. SALINGER
"Teddy"
Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
You have to write a poem the way you ride a horse--you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day--you'll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.
JACK GILBERT
The Paris Review, fall/winter 2005
Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans, especially, have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force; but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem--this poem per se--this poem which is a poem and nothing more--this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
Poetry, indeed, has always been one of humanity's sharpest tools for puncturing the shrink-wrap of silence and oppression.
MARIA POPOVA
"Poetry as Protest and Sanctuary", brainpickings, April 18, 2017
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
So many poets die ere they are known,
I pray you, hear me kindly for their sake.
Not of the harp, but of the soul alone,
Is the deep music all true minstrels make:
Hear my soul's music, and I will beguile,
With string and song, your festival awhile.
HENRY ABBEY
"The Troubadour"
It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and 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
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose ; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
I urge every one, every now and again at least, to lay down the novel and open the poem: but let it be a poem that will enlarge one's conception of life, that will help one to think loftily, and to feel nobly, will teach us that there is something more important to ourselves even than ourselves, something more important and deserving of attention than one's own small griefs and own petty woes, the vast and varied drama of History, the boundless realm of the human imagination, and the tragic interests and pathetic struggles of mankind.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
We do not reject the song that makes the blood dance faster through our veins, or the lyric that thrills us with its sensuous beauty, or the romantic tale that fills up some painful or languorous hour, or the ode that sometimes, lapping our spirits in forgetfulness or summer dreams, brings us welcome reprieve from life's "sore spell of toil." But our unstinted and undying gratitude we reserve for the poet who, finding us disconsolate, comforts us; who, finding us disheartened and ready to yield, sounds the note of advance for us; who, finding us recreant to our trust and disloyal to our aspirations, uncovers for us once more the ideal that has been temporarily obscured. It is he who stays our feet amid the whirling waters of temptation; who sets the stars of faith and love and hope in our benighted sky, and who whispers to us in our lonely and nerveless moments of despair the heartening message of God and immortality.
FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD
Robert Browning
For a genre of literature that is supposedly dead, poetry provides some of the most quoted material in the history of quotes.
STAFF EDITORIAL
The Nevada Sagebrush, April 12, 2016
Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011