quotations about poetry
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
PLATO
Ion
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
On Translating Homer
Poetry is another way of encouraging people to think and feel deeply about their own lives and their relationships to other people and other communities.
HANNAH ENSOR
"Poetry to fill the air at weekend festival", Tucson Sentinel, April 14, 2016
Poetry is Life's wild song.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD
"Poetry"
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
When people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language -- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers -- a language powerful enough to say how it is.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Guardian, November 14, 2008
I string sounds together. But to string them I have to remember a bunch of old ones I heard somewhere and then juggle them into a new rhythm and shape.
FRANK LOESSER
letter to Angel Steinbeck, A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life
From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be--should be--a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.
HORACE
Ars Poetica
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
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
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
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
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"
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
JEAN COCTEAU
"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry