POETRY QUOTES X

quotations about poetry

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

J. D. SALINGER

"Teddy"

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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"

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Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A Defence of Poetry

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Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

JEAN COCTEAU

attributed, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene

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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

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You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

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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


Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

CHARLES DICKENS

The Pickwick Papers

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Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.

LOUIS ARAGON

Treatise on Style

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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"The Philosophy of Composition"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe


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"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe


I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

letter to Melchor Fernandez Almagro, February 1926

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Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering--I mean remembering in words--what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives.

MARY OLIVER

A Poetry Handbook

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Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck,
'Tis fatal to thy fame and to thy neck.

JOHN DRYDEN

Abaslom and Achitophel

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Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry: on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose ; and neither fan nor burned feather can bring her to herself again.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Imaginary Conversations

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If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

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We do not reject the song that makes the blood dance faster through our veins, or the lyric that thrills us with its sensuous beauty, or the romantic tale that fills up some painful or languorous hour, or the ode that sometimes, lapping our spirits in forgetfulness or summer dreams, brings us welcome reprieve from life's "sore spell of toil." But our unstinted and undying gratitude we reserve for the poet who, finding us disconsolate, comforts us; who, finding us disheartened and ready to yield, sounds the note of advance for us; who, finding us recreant to our trust and disloyal to our aspirations, uncovers for us once more the ideal that has been temporarily obscured. It is he who stays our feet amid the whirling waters of temptation; who sets the stars of faith and love and hope in our benighted sky, and who whispers to us in our lonely and nerveless moments of despair the heartening message of God and immortality.

FRANK CUMMINS LOCKWOOD

Robert Browning

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The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, -- the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Table-Talk

Tags: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow