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- Away! away! I will fly to thee,
- Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
- But on the viewless wings of Poesy.
JOHN KEATS, "Ode to a Nightingale"
I don’t think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. “I can’t say it that way, what way can I find that will do?”
T. S. ELIOT, The Paris Review, Spring-Summer, 1959
The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor's domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.
CHINUA ACHEBE, Conjunctions, Fall 1991
A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. ELIOT, Tradition and the Individual Talent
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
Poetry is the utterance of truth--deep, heartfelt truth. The true poet is very near the oracle.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, Aug. 3, 1940
Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. ELIOT, Tradition and the Individual Talent
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Poets are the most injurious romancers by which society is deluded; for they excite the feelings or the imagination to such an extent--creating superhuman excellences--that the dull realities of life, its frauds, its meanness, its falsehood, or even its truth, alike sicken and disgust.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY, The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Poetry is never a sensible choice on financial grounds. Burglary beats poetry, when it comes to making money.
GARRISON KEILLOR, "Does love have to be a five-alarm fire?" Salon.com, Jul. 15, 1998
A small poet repeats himself like a clock.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
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, Oct. 8, 1817
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
T. S. ELIOT, The Music of Poetry
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.
A true poet comes among us only once in a generation, sometimes not once in a century, and ... certain civilized nations never produce a great poet. We suffer from dearth of poets, not from lack of love for poetry.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
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
On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
PABLO NERUDA, The Essential Neruda
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
JOHN ADAMS, letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781
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
- He that would earn the Poet's sacred name,
- Must write for future as for present ages.
CHRISTOPHER PEARSE CRANCH, "The Poet"
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
Every genuine poet is necessarily a Columbus. America existed for centuries before Columbus but it was only Columbus who was able to track it down.
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk
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