quotations about poetry
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
"The Theatre of Cruelty" (Second Manifesto), The Theater and Its Double
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"
I urge every one, every now and again at least, to lay down the novel and open the poem: but let it be a poem that will enlarge one's conception of life, that will help one to think loftily, and to feel nobly, will teach us that there is something more important to ourselves even than ourselves, something more important and deserving of attention than one's own small griefs and own petty woes, the vast and varied drama of History, the boundless realm of the human imagination, and the tragic interests and pathetic struggles of mankind.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe III", L'art romantique
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
A Defence of Poetry
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
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
CHARLES DICKENS
The Pickwick Papers
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
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"
There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
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
You have to write a poem the way you ride a horse--you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day--you'll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.
JACK GILBERT
The Paris Review, fall/winter 2005
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"
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
Writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, November 6, 1937
Poetry, indeed, has always been one of humanity's sharpest tools for puncturing the shrink-wrap of silence and oppression.
MARIA POPOVA
"Poetry as Protest and Sanctuary", brainpickings, April 18, 2017
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
JAMES JOYCE
a lecture on James Clarence Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin, February 1, 1902
The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Poetry as religion -- I'll drink to that! For me it is a sacred vocation, and one that no one can take away from me. One is a witch in community, one has a job title conferred by an employer: but one can be a poet without approval or sanction from anyone else. Even a child writing their first poems may call themselves a poet. I love that.
YVONNE ABURROW
"On Poetry: A Conversation", Patheos, April 30, 2016