quotations about poetry
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
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Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
Poetry is the other way of using language.
HOWARD NEMEROV
Reflexions on Poetry & Politics
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
Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W. H. AUDEN
New Year Letter
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Children of the Poets", Pall Mall Gazette, October 14, 1886
Certain events such as love, or a national calamity, or May, bring pressure to bear on the individual, and if the pressure is strong enough, something in the form of verse is bound to be squeezed out.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Paris Review, fall 1975
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
Joyous or bereaved, poetry is the ink and paper realm of emotion.
MAGGIE GRIMASON
"The Province of the Heart", Alibi, April 28, 2016
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781
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
'Tis true among fields and woods I sing,
Aloof from cities--that my poor strains
Were born, like the simple flowers you bring,
In English meadows and English lanes.
ALFRED AUSTIN
prelude, Soliloquies in Song
Good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it.
UMBERTO ECO
The Paris Review, summer 2008
I despise slam poetry. Not as much as I despise ukulele orchestras, but it's up there. You can make all the connections you like to the spoken word performance poetry of the Beats and hippies of the 1950s and '60s (Allen Ginsberg performing Howl in 1959), Harlem roasts of the '20s and '30s, and Flyting (the bardic insult competitions the Anglo-Nordic peoples filled in the long winters with between the fifth and sixteenth centuries) and good luck to you, but I hate it.
ANDREW PAUL WOOD
"Slam poetry is despicable and dumb-ass and not good", The Spinoff, April 27, 2016
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
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
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Philosophy of Style
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
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"
A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.
JOHN DRYDEN
Fables, Ancient and Modern