quotations about poetry
A small poet repeats himself like a clock.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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.
APHRA BEHN
Oroonoko
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
We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Poetry"
Poetry is the other way of using language.
HOWARD NEMEROV
Reflexions on Poetry & Politics
Poetry is prose in slow motion.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
I think that believing in language -- in the ability of words to bring even an imagined reality into being -- is a big part of what it means to write poetry. If something like an idea or a belief is capable of being imagined or even described, then the possibility that it will be acted upon becomes much more likely. I think that many of my poems are attempts to take myself up on that premise, to step into conversation with voices and events that require me to decide something: what do I believe is right? What is the more subtle or subjective view of this situation? What must I challenge myself to understand?
TRACY K. SMITH
interview, Ploughshares Literary Magazine, May 30, 2012
I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.
ANNE CARSON
The Paris Review, fall 2004
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
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH
interview, 2007
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 is God's work.
KATY LEDERER
"An Interview with Katy Lederer", Thermos Magazine, January 21, 2010
Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
MARY OLIVER
A Poetry Handbook
I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.
MAYA ANGELOU
Facebook post, October 4, 2012
Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008
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"
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Ellen O'Leary, February 3, 1889
The poem that says "I love you" is the little black cocktail dress, the classic thing that everyone would like to have written one of.
JAMES FENTON
BBC Radio, October 4, 1994