quotations about poetry
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Safety Pins and Other Essays
Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.
AMY LOWELL
preface, Tendencies in Modern Poetry
You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.
ADAM PHILLIPS
The Paris Review, spring 2014
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
The crown of literature is poetry.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Essays in Criticism, Second Series
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 (by extension, any art) is a response, it is part of a conversation between the writer and the larger world--and just writing that I realize how much our writing is a form of listening. And we have a response-ability that can grow, shift, change as we do over the years.
SARAH SADIE
"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016
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
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
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
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
Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
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
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
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
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
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
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Poets are the chemists of sentiment, for they analyze and purify it.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust