quotations about poetry
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. ELIOT
"Dante"
The poet is the man that sings,
That plays upon the harp's wild strings,
That reads the tale of starry skies,
That soars aloft on seraph's wings.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FIELD
"Poetry"
No really sensible person ever remembers enough poetry to recite it.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings
Then one can't make a living out of poetry?
Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
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
Poetry can be a really great outlet for kids and teens. There are so many rules when you're a teen, but writing poetry is totally open-ended. It's a great way for kids and teens to talk about their feelings and what's going on with no rules. Whatever comes out, comes out.
ELISSA DICKSON
"Elissa Dickson is new San Miguel County Poet Laureate", The Daily Planet, May 4, 2016
Poetry is pretty much everywhere: bubbling in the broken coffee machine, creeping through the cold-calls, boasting in the empty bank balance. Poetry is disconcerting and at best dangerous, lurking in that deep-stomach lurch when you lean too close to the platform edge.
JADE CUTTLE
"A plate of poetry, please: Is poetry more important than politics?", Varsity Online, May 3, 2016
No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.
T. S. ELIOT
The Music of Poetry
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
"The Town"
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
A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.
JOHN DRYDEN
Fables, Ancient and Modern
Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs -- no regular hours, so many temptations!
ELIZABETH BISHOP
One Art: Letters
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
For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Tarr
The object of linguistics is language; that of poetics is concrete utterance. Language is an institution, a formal system which constitutes, for the hypothetical speaker, a "competence"; it is a virtual object. Speech (the poetic utterance, for our purposes) is an individual act which formulates a concrete discourse; it is a "performance".
ANNA BALAKIAN
The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages
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
Poems want to awaken intimacy, connection, expansion, and wildness.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
interview, Words with Writers, December 5, 2011
All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
T. S. ELIOT
The Sacred Wood