quotations about poetry
Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
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
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
JEAN COCTEAU
attributed, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
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
If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
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
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T. S. ELIOT
The Sacred Wood
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
Whenever I read a poem that moves me, I know I'm not alone in the world. I feel a connection to the person who wrote it, knowing that he or she has gone through something similar to what I've experienced, or felt something like what I have felt. And their poem gives me hope and courage, because I know that they survived, that their life force was strong enough to turn experience into words and shape it into meaning and then bring it toward me to share.
GREGORY ORR
All Things Considered, February 20, 2006
The object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is concrete utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypothetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object. Speech (the poetic utterance, for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a "performance".
ANNA BALAKIAN
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages
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
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
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
Writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, November 6, 1937
Poetry as religion -- I'll drink to that! For me it is a sacred vocation, and one that no one can take away from me. One is a witch in community, one has a job title conferred by an employer: but one can be a poet without approval or sanction from anyone else. Even a child writing their first poems may call themselves a poet. I love that.
YVONNE ABURROW
"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016
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