Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry
Some poems are like the Centaurs--a mingling of man and beast, and begotten of Ixion on a cloud.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Table-Talk
Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. SALINGER, "Seymour: An Introduction"
A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry
Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, "The Town"
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, A Defence of Poetry
- True poetry is not of earth,
- 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE, "Parnassus," Coudrifts at Twilight
Poets' food is love and fame.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "An Exhortation"
I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, The Paris Review, fall 1981
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, Nov. 14, 2008
Because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavor of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
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
A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the pain and yowls at the weapons that lacerate him; the great poet explores the inflamed lips of ruined flesh with ice-caked fingers, glittering and precise; but ultimately his poem is the echoing, dual voice reporting the damages.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, The Fall of the Towers
Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, Introduction to Aesthetics
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.
JANE HIRSHFIELD, The Atlantic Online, Sep. 18, 1997
As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.
SAMUEL R. DELANY, Rain Taxi, winter 2000/2001
Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
JORGE LUIS BORGES, "The Divine Comedy"
- I hate my verses, every line, every word.
- Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
- One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
- That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
- Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
- One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
ROBINSON JEFFERS, "Love the Wild Swan"
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