POETRY QUOTES V

quotations about poetry

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante's Paradise, would afford, more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music, are illustrations still more decisive.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


Some people pretend they never were in love and never wrote poetry; two weaknesses which they dare not own -- one of the heart, the other of the mind.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of the Affections", Les Caractères

Tags: Jean de La Bruyere


Poetry (by extension, any art) is a response, it is part of a conversation between the writer and the larger world--and just writing that I realize how much our writing is a form of listening. And we have a response-ability that can grow, shift, change as we do over the years.

SARAH SADIE

"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016


Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.

FRANCIS BACON

The Advancement of Learning

Tags: Francis Bacon


Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, May 28, 1788

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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

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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

Tags: Percy Bysshe Shelley


When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

interview, The Paris Review, fall 2013

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The permanent passions of mankind--love, religion, patriotism, humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will and fate; the rise and fall of empires--these are all great themes, and, if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind.

ALFRED AUSTIN

The Bridling of Pegasus

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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

ADRIENNE RICH

attributed, Unlocking the Poem

Tags: Adrienne Rich


Poetry is prose in slow motion.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

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No doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side of virtue and of the Gods.

ALFRED AUSTIN

The Bridling of Pegasus

Tags: Alfred Austin


If you can't be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?

BERNARD BECKETT

Lullaby

Tags: Bernard Beckett


I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997

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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

Tags: T. S. Eliot


Here! is this you on the top of Fan-ko Mountain,
Wearing a huge hat in the noon-day sun?
How thin, how wretchedly thin, you have grown!
You must have been suffering from poetry again.

LI BAI

"Addressed Humorously to Tu Fu"

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A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

JEAN COCTEAU

"Le Secret Professionnel", A Call to Order

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You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.

JOHN ADAMS

letter to John Quincy Adams, May 14, 1781

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There is no true poet in whom fancy is not close akin to faith.

JOHN C. BAILEY

The Claims of French Poetry

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The poet's is the highest type of character: other men dwell in the conventional--he chiefly abides in the universal.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee