quotations about poetry
Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.
JOHN DRYDEN
Abaslom and Achitophel
If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
JOHN KEATS
letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818
The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"The Albotross"
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
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
There is a widespread notion in the public mind that poetic inspiration has something mysterious and translunar about it, something which altogether escapes human analysis, which it would be almost sacrilege for analysis to touch. The Romans spoke of the poet's divine afflatus, the Elizabethans of his fine frenzy. And even in our own day critics, and poets themselves, are not lacking who take the affair quite as seriously. Our critics and poets are themselves largely responsible for this -- they are a sentimental lot, even when most discerning, and cannot help indulging, on the one hand, in a reverential attitude toward the art, and, on the other, in a reverential attitude toward themselves.
CONRAD AIKEN
Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry
Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
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
Poets' food is love and fame.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"An Exhortation"
Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral; and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans, especially, have patronized this happy idea; and we Bostonians, very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force; but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem--this poem per se--this poem which is a poem and nothing more--this poem written solely for the poem's sake.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS
The Pickwick Papers
For a genre of literature that is supposedly dead, poetry provides some of the most quoted material in the history of quotes.
STAFF EDITORIAL
The Nevada Sagebrush, April 12, 2016
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
So many poets die ere they are known,
I pray you, hear me kindly for their sake.
Not of the harp, but of the soul alone,
Is the deep music all true minstrels make:
Hear my soul's music, and I will beguile,
With string and song, your festival awhile.
HENRY ABBEY
"The Troubadour"
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
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
Debate doesn't really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope.... That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Paris Review, Fall 1997